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Almost any article in The Players' Tribune

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Almost any article in The Players' Tribune

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https://www.theplayerstribune.com/

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The Players’ Tribune | The Voice of the Game

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The Players’ Tribune is a sports media company that provides athletes with a platform to connect directly with their fans, in their own words.

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Beginning in 1951, radio pioneer Edward R. Murrow asked Americans from all walks of life to write essays about their most fundamental and closely held beliefs. Half a century later, NPR, Atlantic Public Media and This I Believe, Inc. are partnering to recreate 'This I Believe' on the air and online.

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The Porch  The soul of a house lies just up the front steps.

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The Porch  The soul of a house lies just up the front steps.

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A Different Take on a Personal Essay-Poem

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A Different Take on a Personal Essay-Poem

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I'm ready to let you go. I want you to know now, so we both can savor every moment we have left together.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/diana/spencerfull.html#:~:text=%22I%20stand%20before%20you%20today,our%20need%20to%20do%20so.&text=It%20is%20a%20more%20remarkable,hope%20to%20offer%20her%20today.

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A brother remembers his sister

Full text of Earl Spencer's Funeral Oration
"I stand before you today the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning before a world in shock.
"We are all united not only in our desire to pay our respects to Diana but rather in our need to do so. For such was her extraordinary appeal that the tens of millions of people taking part in this service all over the world via television and radio who never actually met her, feel that they too lost someone close to them in the early hours of Sunday morning. It is a more remarkable tribute to Diana than I can ever hope to offer her today.

"No Need for Royal Title"

"Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity. All over the world, a standard bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality. Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.

"Today is our chance to say thank you for the way you brightened our lives, even though God granted you but half a life. We will all feel cheated always that you were taken from us so young and yet we must learn to be grateful that you came along at all. Only now that you are gone do we truly appreciate what we are now without and we want you to know that life without you is very, very difficult.

"We have all despaired at our loss over the past week and only the strength of the message you gave us through your years of giving has afforded us the strength to move forward.

"Great Gift of Intuition"

"There is a temptation to rush to canonise your memory, there is no need to do so. You stand tall enough as a human being of unique qualities not to need to be seen as a saint. Indeed to sanctify your memory would be to miss out on the very core of your being, your wonderfully mischievous sense of humour with a laugh that bent you double.
"Your joy for life transmitted where ever you took your smile and the sparkle in those unforgettable eyes. Your boundless energy which you could barely contain.

"But your greatest gift was your intuition and it was a gift you used wisely. This is what underpinned all your other wonderful attributes and if we look to analyse what it was about you that had such a wide appeal we find it in your instinctive feel for what was really important in all our lives.

"Without your God-given sensitivity we would be immersed in greater ignorance at the anguish of Aids and HIV sufferers, the plight of the homeless, the isolation of lepers, the random destruction of landmines.

"Innermost Feelings of Suffering"

"Diana explained to me once that it was her innermost feelings of suffering that made it possible for her to connect with her constituency of the rejected.
"And here we come to another truth about her. For all the status, the glamour, the applause, Diana remained throughout a very insecure person at heart, almost childlike in her desire to do good for others so she could release herself from deep feelings of unworthiness of which her eating disorders were merely a symptom.

"The world sensed this part of her character and cherished her for her vulnerability whilst admiring her for her honesty.

"The last time I saw Diana was on July 1, her birthday in London, when typically she was not taking time to celebrate her special day with friends but was guest of honour at a special charity fundraising evening. She sparkled of course, but I would rather cherish the days I spent with her in March when she came to visit me and my children in our home in South Africa. I am proud of the fact apart from when she was on display meeting President Mandela we managed to contrive to stop the ever-present paparazzi from getting a single picture of her - that meant a lot to her.

"These were days I will always treasure. It was as if we had been transported back to our childhood when we spent such an enormous amount of time together - the two youngest in the family.

"Fundamentally she had not changed at all from the big sister who mothered me as a baby, fought with me at school and endured those long train journeys between our parents' homes with me at weekends.

"It is a tribute to her level-headedness and strength that despite the most bizarre-like life imaginable after her childhood, she remained intact, true to herself.

"Diana's Goodness Threatened the Media"

"There is no doubt that she was looking for a new direction in her life at this time. She talked endlessly of getting away from England, mainly because of the treatment that she received at the hands of the newspapers. I don't think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling.
"My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this - a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.

"She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys William and Harry from a similar fate and I do this here Diana on your behalf. We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair.

"Blood Family Will Protect Sons"

"And beyond that, on behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.
"We fully respect the heritage into which they have both been born and will always respect and encourage them in their royal role but we, like you, recognise the need for them to experience as many different aspects of life as possible to arm them spiritually and emotionally for the years ahead. I know you would have expected nothing less from us.

"William and Harry, we all cared desperately for you today. We are all chewed up with the sadness at the loss of a woman who was not even our mother. How great your suffering is, we cannot even imagine.

"I would like to end by thanking God for the small mercies he has shown us at this dreadful time. For taking Diana at her most beautiful and radiant and when she had joy in her private life. Above all we give thanks for the life of a woman I am so proud to be able to call my sister, the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds."

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A brother remembers his sister "I stand before you today the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning before a world in shock. "We are all united not only in our desire to pay our respects to Diana but rather in our need to do so.

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I open the email at 9:30 a.m. in my retrofitted, windowless office on the second floor of a high school in St. Paul. The fluorescent lights are so bright and the walls so white that sometimes I look up from my computer screen and feel as if I'm in a dream. Everything blurs and bends. Here, I shield myself from my students' bodies, from their breath, in between teaching classes. I remove my mask, just briefly, to eat lunch while refreshing a COVID Tracking Map. November 3, 2020: 1,040 people died in the U.S. from COVID-19.

I read the email's subject line: "The results of your request are now available in a paperless inbox," before noticing the sender is American Education Services, a private student loan servicer. The body of the email informs me that AES has added a message to the inbox: something about new loan terms that will require me to begin payments in December. I minimize the screen and scan the room quickly as if the desk lamp and the growing stack of compostable knives can see the message. I pull the screen up and read the email again, willing the language to be different this time, but it's not. My AES account, along with accounts from a handful of other private loan servicers, was settled in 2018 after protracted and painful negotiations that had begun years earlier. What remains, or what I thought remained, is $2,000 in federal student loan debt. But now there appears to be a new loan, something left unsettled. I close the computer screen. Elbows on white table. Head in hands. I cry.

The email from AES is the first I have received from them in over six years, part of a halted but lengthy correspondence that began, unbeknownst to me, on July 29, 2004, when I was 18 and my mother took out the first of many private student loans in my name. That July day was cold in southwest Michigan, a detail I researched years later when I wondered: What went on in her world that day? It rained. There was little sun. In the morning, my father drove to his corporate office to design washing machine parts, I drove to a golf club where I worked in their food shack, and sometime that day, my mother contacted Bank One, a student lending arm of Chase Bank, and requested $15,000 in my name using my birthdate and Social Security number. I've never been able to ask her how the fraud was committed - if she told the bank that she was applying on my behalf and would get my approval later, or if, pretending to be me, she filled out an application online. It's unclear if Bank One, who partnered with AES for loan management and collection, asked her the questions they should have, the questions that might reveal that she did not have my approval or that she was not me. I'm unsure if the bank account she funneled the money to was one she opened in my name or hers. I do know that on the loan application she forged my signature, which I'll see years later - the swoop of the cursive "K" larger and fuller than mine.

Over the course of the next three years, as my mother's gambling addiction escalated, she took out another student loan, and then another, and then so many others that the amounts and institutions from which she borrowed knotted together into something big and impossible to disentangle, but the accumulation of which was about $125,000. It seems that none of the private lenders were alarmed by the rapid acquisition of increasingly large amounts of money - more than I would ever need for my state-school tuition - a record of lending they would have seen when they pulled my credit. It might be that they noticed and didn't care.

While I didn't know about my fraudulent debt in those years, I did know that my mother had her own. At home during university breaks, I often fielded calls from credit card debt collectors, the phone company, or the internet company. I learned to recognize the callers' scripts, and the moment they departed from them, becoming angry with me for refusing to put my mother on the phone, threatening to shut off our services if we didn't pay. And there were other signs her gambling problem was growing big and wild. Bounced checks. Denied credit cards at the supermarket. My mother, home late with handfuls of cash, tipsily offering my friends and me $50 because she'd won on slots that night.

I walked home from the bank, rejected credit card application in hand, as if walking toward certain death. In place of the steady hum of college students commuting to class, all I heard was the hollow sound of the wind as I slid my boots across the slick sidewalk. Home now, seated on my bed in a new world, frozen still, I held the credit report in front of me, counting the listed debts: $10,000 owed to JPMorgan Chase, $20,000 to ACS Education Services, $15,0000 owed to someone else. I didn't yet know that the majority of these were private loans protected by the federal government. This can't be right, I said to myself over and over again. Part incantation, part desperate plea.

When I called my mother to tell her and ask for her advice, she begged me not to call the police. "I'm so sorry, honey. But it was me. All of it was me."

In late March of 2020, as the first wave of the pandemic spread across the country, Congress passed the CARES Act, a $2 trillion aid package marketed as relief to struggling Americans. While the act provided much-needed relief for those most impacted by the pandemic, it didn't provide enough. The $1,200 received by poor and working-class Americans was spent quickly on essential items, which, sadly, included debt.

As part of that act, Congress included several measures to support student debtors. First, their employers - if they were lucky enough to be employed - were able to provide them with up to $5,250 in tax-free student loan repayment benefits. Before the CARES Act, only about eight percent of employers were making contributions toward student loans, and as businesses and institutions closed, most employers reduced benefits rather than expanding them. During the first four months of the pandemic, at least four million workers had their pay cut, and nearly six million workers were forced to work part-time. In other words, though this measure could have helped student debtors, there's very little evidence to suggest that it did.

The second measure affecting student debtors was an automatic suspension of payments on federal student loans, a relief extended several times and now set to after January 31st, 2022. As part of this moratorium, loan servicers cannot collect loan payments, including on defaulted loans, and interest rates remain at 0%. Roughly 35 million student debtors are eligible for this temporary relief, collectively owing $1.5 trillion. I'm one of them: Of the $14,000 I knowingly took out in federal student aid, about $2,000 remains. It's worth noting that the many millions of borrowers whose debt is privately held are excluded from these benefits. Few private lenders, if any, deferred interest, and most offered only a three-month suspension on collection.

April 2020 marked the first month since I graduated college 13 years earlier that I didn't pay a portion of my wage, at times nearly half of my wage, toward my student debt: either my own federal debt or the $125,000 that my mother took out in my name. For many people, the moratorium is a lifesaving pause. Those who are unemployed can perhaps afford a car payment or a home payment or the co-payment necessary to see a doctor. The employed can also make dignified decisions to care for themselves and others. They can fix the broken heater in their car. Buy medication and a working phone. Or something more banal and essential still: groceries.

Employed as a teacher and earning a living wage, my own debts didn't force me to go without shelter, food, or basic utilities, a fact that was tested in my 20s when I had trouble finding landlords who'd rent to me because of my credit score. When the moratorium went into effect, I increased my contribution to my 401(k), which had recently sent me a message saying that based on my modest savings goals, I would not be able to sustain myself in old age. I also bought a winter coat, the first I'd purchased in seven years. The old one had thinned so much that it was porous, and the Minneapolis wind moved through me in the winter. This was not the first time in seven years I'd had enough money for a coat. Rather, having lived with financial anxiety for so long I struggle to decide what to spend money on, what's worth depleting my small but growing savings account, even by a couple of hundred dollars.

I return to AES's message, this time from my home, where I teach virtually the second half of the week. After attempting to log on to the account, I soon realize I no longer have the information. This account, like all of them, was created by my mother and managed in secret for the years I was in college. It was opened after her gambling problem bloomed into an addiction, after she'd spent her and my father's savings, along with the money she'd borrowed from his mother and from her parents, and money she'd stolen from her employer. It would have made sense for me to reset everything once I learned of the account's existence, but I never did. I wonder now if I conflated this step with an acknowledgment that the debt was mine. Often the tiny protests I waged in my 20s hurt me: I lost paperwork, passwords, loan correspondences. I missed details that would have made managing my mounting debt easier. But I didn't want to manage it. I wanted to pretend that it wasn't there.

April 2020 marked the first month since I graduated college 13 years earlier that I didn't pay a portion of my wage, at times nearly half of my wage, toward my student debt: either my own federal debt or the $125,000 that my mother took out in my name.

After I discovered the debt, the boundaries between myself and everything else became cloudy. At first, it was just my mother begging me not to file criminal charges. She called me regularly in those days: "You can't send me to jail," she said over and over, her voice rushing around me, familiar as the sound of the wind.

I agreed not to, not so much because I believed that she would be capable of helping me like she promised, but because I didn't have a clear sense of where I ended and my mother began. After she was released from her incarceration for workplace theft only a few months into her sentence, my father and grandparents asked me not to file charges. "Your mother won't survive it again," they told me. "She doesn't deserve it." "You're young. You're strong," they said. "We'll help you figure it out." I didn't want my mother to suffer and didn't believe that her criminal conviction was a requirement for my justice and healing. But beyond my love and my politics was the sense that I was beginning to dissolve, and self-preservation felt impossible in the face of this rapid depletion.

Alas, I figure it out: She answered as me.

AES explains that I must begin to make payments on my loan, the first of which is due in early December. I'm surprised to realize that, unlike federal loans, private loans such as this one are not covered under the moratorium. More than that, I'm surprised this loan exists at all.

Looking at the details of my loan feels like looking at a hand that has appeared suddenly before me, attached to my own body. Part of me but not mine. The loan is through a private student loan program (ALPLN) that often requires young borrowers to enlist co-signers, locking both parties in for long repayment plans with variable interest rates that fluctuate according to the market, but rarely to the benefit of the borrower. The original balance of this loan was $25,000 (the equivalent of two semesters in-state at the University of Michigan in 2008, or a down payment on a home in a middle-class Minneapolis neighborhood today), but today I owe $30,549.08 (two semesters + living expenses) and were I to finish paying this loan, I would pay in total $40,051.86 (a nicer house, another semester)

For all of my 20s, I worked multiple jobs to keep up with the $600 monthly loan payments. In 2013, for example, I taught sophomore English at a high school in Chicago, working from 7:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. On Tuesdays, I led our school's literary magazine club till 5:30 p.m., and for six weeks each semester, on Wednesdays and Thursdays, I taught night school classes till 6:30 p.m. for students who needed credit recovery. On Saturdays, I picked up ACT administration work, and on Mondays, I picked up ACT tutoring. After I got home at 7:00 or 7:30 p.m., or later, I wrote the next day's lesson plan as I picked at my dinner. If I also had to give students feedback on essays, I worked until 10:00 pm, falling asleep with the next day's schedule pulsing beside me. Up at 6:15 a.m. to do it all again. By the time I turned 30, I had paid off about $60,000 of the debt, an amount that barely touched the interest. It was not enough. The debt kept rising, not by $10,000, but by $100,000, and then another $100,000, more than doubling the principal balance.

In ancient civilizations, debt repayment was a promise secured by the body. In India an unpaid creditor could show up at his debtor's door, sit on his doorstep, and stay there, indefinitely, publicly starving to death until he was given what he was owed. In Egypt, a debtor pledged their repayment on the dead body of a loved one.

So, too, was debt imprisonment, which existed in the barbarian kingdoms that followed the Roman Empire in the West. Still later, as feudalism declined, the Catholic Church encouraged and enforced imprisonment for unpaid debts. Those debtors who died without leaving enough money to cover their remaining debts were denied a Christian burial, their very bodies unwelcome on holy land.

Debtors' prisons followed colonists from England to the Americas, where they remained in practice until the mid-1800s. According to many of the colonies' laws, sentences had no fixed length: One could remain incarcerated for a month or years, whatever amount of time satisfied the creditors. While the prisons' upper-class debtors were often assigned well-lit rooms where they could write or paint, the poorest prisoners slept in the cellar, sometimes sitting in near darkness day and night, hungry and cold, threatened by disease. In this case, the punishment was not labor or mutilation, but isolation and stagnation: a body left alone to rot.

Living in New York City in my early 20s, I began my first year of teaching, and my mother began her trial for workplace embezzlement. I'd learned of her arrest earlier that summer - standing in a dorm room in Queens where I was undergoing teacher training. Just out of the shower, my wet hair dripped into puddles on the floor as my aunt explained over the phone that my mother had been stealing from the dentist she managed medical billing for. When we hung up, I didn't feel anything. I considered what my aunt thought she had stolen - around $40,000 - and all I could think of was, "that's all?" It was nothing compared to what she owed me.

After my mother began her five-month sentence, I moved through my life as if I were underwater. On land, I was required to participate: laugh with colleagues, cook dinner with my roommates, engage in conversations about the future and the past, both of which I wanted to avoid. Submerged in the water, I was alone, stranded in a perpetual present. For weeks I lived like this, allowing the calls from debt collectors to hover over me like ships on the surface, and then suddenly, I would come in from the sea - awakened by a nightmare at 3:00 a.m., or sitting at a student-desk eating my lunch, I would suddenly be thrust back into the bright, loud world. And then I would feel the full weight of it all: hundreds of thousands of dollars that I'd pay until I died.

I slept poorly during those years, plagued by severe stomach pains and recurrent UTIs that sometimes reached my kidneys. Once, after a week of particularly distressing calls with debt collectors, I woke on a Saturday morning to a full stomach, even though I hadn't eaten. Throughout the morning, the fullness increased, as did the pain, like barbed wire wrapping my insides. When I moved, I could hear acid swish inside me. I started puking in the afternoon, and when I hadn't stopped by early evening, I walked to Mount Sinai Hospital, where I spent the night. I cried when a nurse held my hand, asking me to swallow the cool medication that would allow her to see inside of me. I didn't tell anyone I was sick because, at the time, I was estranged from both my parents, and there was no one to tell.

And then I would feel the full weight of it all: hundreds of thousands of dollars that I'd pay until I died.

Debt was still a promise held by my body, and absent of the money, my body paid in other ways. I learned from the endoscopy that I had an ulcer and had developed gastritis. The cystoscopy was inconclusive, but years later, in my early 30s, I'd begin to notice pressure on my left side: the feeling of a tiny fist punching softly outward just below my ribcage. After doctors told me it was nothing for several years, I'd find the right doctors who gave the right tests, and I'd learn that my kidney had died. Perhaps, my doctor said, it had died when I was young, lost its blood supply through a misfire in design, or it might have died later as a result of the many escalating UTI infections. A stomach for AES, to which I owed $51k, a kidney for JPMorgan Chase to which I owed $30k.

As a market economy emerged in the 1700s, according to Jill Lepore in a essay on the historical treatment of debtors, debt punishments shifted away from imprisonment - which also meant that punishments shifted away from the body. Individuals, she explains, to take on debt to acquire the things they needed, a relationship that necessitated debt relief, which came in the form of bankruptcy.

However, that relief has come with limitations, especially in the field of student loans. Until 1978, students facing unmanageable debt could petition for bankruptcy - though it's worth noting that in 1978 the semester tuition for a four-year public university was $777, so fewer students took on debt to begin with. Through the combination of the Education Amendment Act of 1976 and additional legislation in 1978, 1984, 1990, and 1998, students gradually lost more and more protections, a loss that coincided with a precipitous increase in tuition fees. First, students could have their federal debts discharged after they had made payments on them for five years, then that time period was extended to seven years, and then extended to the lifetime of the borrower. Finally, the lifetime sentence was extended to private student loans as well as federal.

What that means is that people are paying off their student debts into old age. People are dying with this debt based on decisions they or their families made when they were 18. Sometimes these decisions were made with counsel from for-profit colleges that promised salaries and degrees they couldn't produce. Sometimes these decisions were made with counsel from private lenders, who offer predatory interest rates that make it nearly impossible to pay loans down. Other times, racial or structural inequality or bad luck forced students out of school, funneling them into jobs that would never yield the salaries necessary to pay off even relatively small amounts of debt. In other instances, students graduated and found employment, but because the cost of tuition has ballooned and wages have flattened, they are still stuck with this debt sentence, even after falling on the right side of luck, the right side of privilege, even after they did everything right.

Those who suffer most from the current student-lending structure are the same people who suffer because of historical and structural inequity: descendants of enslaved people, people of color, women, poor people. Black women hold the highest levels of student debt, and because they make 61 cents for every dollar that a white man makes, they struggle to pay this debt down, even as they work multiple jobs, even as debt extracts their health and their labor.

The decision to enter into my loan agreements was not mine, of course, but my mother's, a fact that I communicated to the debt collectors with whom I tried to negotiate in my early 20s. In one of the many calls I remember, I'm standing at the corner of 78th Street in the early evening, just as day tips into night.

"You don't understand," I tell the debt collector. "This debt isn't mine. I didn't take it out. My mother did."

"That's not our problem," he says, "You should take it up with the police." He sounds young.

At the time, I didn't know that collectors are required to verify contested debts. However, this requirement is widely ignored by debt collectors, one of the many abuses - along with harassment, threats, and the disclosure of debts to family and colleagues - that the Federal Trade Commission documents.

I cup my hand around the phone, to muffle not the wind but my own voice. I don't want the couples leaning against the railing or the people running with their dogs to hear me. "Why would I need this much money in private loans to attend a school with an in-state tuition of $13,000 a year?"

Occasionally I did this, said things that required the collectors to imagine a human from the numbers listed in front of them: a one, a two, a five, and so many zeroes unwound into legs and arms. Sometimes, the collectors sounded sad for me. At least a few times, they said they were sorry. But, still, they recorded what they were required to, the distillation of which was that I couldn't or wouldn't pay. And then my name was added to the next escalation in collection efforts: another letter, another call, eventually a court order and wage garnishment.

The collectors' emotional disengagement is a necessity of a cruel industry. To respond to me humanely would make the task nearly impossible. While debt cleaves to bodies, its collection requires severance from them. To them, I'm not a terrified 21-year-old too ashamed to take the call in her apartment, but a name, an interest rate, a monthly payment, a total debt paid, a number yet to collect.

I call AES a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving. It's been years since I've last spoken with someone representing the lenders, and I'm haunted by all the conversations that I've already had. When I speak, my voice sounds distant and caffeinated.

"This can't be right," I say to her, the same thing I said sitting on my college bed 13 years earlier, holding the credit report printed for me by the bank. No longer an incantation, but an elegy.

My disbelief is an evolution of the original, a shared origin with a new context. At the nadir of my indebtedness, unable to save enough, unable to pay enough, I met with several lawyers who said they couldn't help me. The first told me that to file a criminal charge and potentially transfer the debt would endanger my grandparents - my mother's immigrant parents - who, unclear on the US lending system, had co-signed on many of the fraudulent loans. "The banks will go after them and they will likely lose their house," he said, mapping an elaborate spider-like diagram of the debt. He called in several colleagues to consult with, explaining the complexities of my case. At the center of the drawing was me, alone in a thick, black circle. The second lawyer, who I met with a few years later, said criminal charges couldn't work even if I wanted to pursue them because the statute of limitations had passed. Later, a lawyer friend recommended a bankruptcy attorney. I met the attorney, Todd, in his office in the middle of a late fall blizzard. I was buoyed by his fancy brass lamps and sprawling Persian carpet. I needed him to help me and he did.

While my loans were protected through the bankruptcy codes, we'd use my bankruptcy petition to pause collection while I could pay down the credit card debt my mother had also taken out through the Chapter 13 bankruptcy plan - a plan traditionally used to help people keep their homes. I'd also pay off the federal debt, which I had taken on knowingly. We'd use the legal framework to force a conversation with the lenders that refused to communicate with me otherwise. These conversations were logistical hurdles because locating all my lenders required piecing together credit reports, old statements my mother had sent me, and statements the lenders pulled. No one database records all private loan debt. At least once, we thought we'd found it all only to realize we'd missed $50,000 from a loan servicer I'd never heard of.

Debt was still a promise held by my body, and absent of the money, my body paid in other ways.

Our strategy was bifurcated: I moved through the traditional bankruptcy process, taking the required financial management classes, showing up to court dates, sending monthly checks to my trustee, and Todd ushered me through fraud proceedings according to the requirements of the lenders, proceedings which mostly relied on handwriting analysis. I signed my name a hundred times. I wrote addresses and numbers in cursive and print, or random men's names, seemingly taken from a list of Dickens characters. When the lenders rejected my fraud claims on the basis of my handwriting, we hired our own expert. Eventually, my mother, shielded by the seven-year statute of limitations on criminal convictions, signed an affidavit that the debt was hers, and after a settlement with the lenders, the loans were moved from my body back to hers, though the lenders have never reached out to her. They're likely aware that her economic position, as a minimum wage worker, makes the debt uncollectible.

"I have a legal agreement with the loan companies," I tell the woman. My voice is thin and wet. "It's from several years ago. I have the signature of someone representing AES. It's a legal document," I say again.

"I have you paused for bankruptcy but now you're done and there is nothing about any settlement," she says.

I catch my partner's eye as he walks into the room, alerted by my rising voice that something is wrong. I'm self-conscious of how I sound, the way I'm escalating the conversation, begging her to put someone else on the phone, which she doesn't do. When I ask her if I can email her the settlement, she says it's impossible: They'll only accept faxes and snail mail. Eventually, she suggests a convoluted form I might fill out that will put someone in touch with me over email.

"This isn't fair," I say to her before we hang up, a sentiment that startles me in its naivete and desperation. Of course it isn't.

In my early 20s, I took a free poetry class through my teaching program, and when we practiced writing exercises for imagery and metaphor, I wrote about my debt. A red balloon for each dollar: 125,000 balloons, enough to fill a city block. They follow me as I walk around the city, west on 77th to the train station or east on 77th to the river. Cloud-like, but alive, each bobbing and swaying separately. The balloons cast a long shadow. Sometimes, I stand beneath them looking up. No more sunshine. They've ushered in a new world, a red sky.

After I speak to the collector, I ignore the new set of emails, the mail correspondence, the alarming language of delinquency. Already the last three years - the years without large monthly loan payments, without collectors - seem far away. A shadow gathers above.

My lawyer thinks this new debt is a forgotten one, a lost one now found. When I call him, he's surprised to hear my voice.

"This can't be right. We settled all of this," he tells me. But we haven't. After cross-checking the settlement details and the loan, I discover it's not listed on the settlement. It's also not on the list of all the private loans that we painstakingly gathered piece-meal to guide our strategy. When I explain this to my lawyer he says, "But that list came directly from AES. So, if there is an error, it's theirs. Or they didn't have the loan at the time."

This new loan, this zombie loan as I've taken to calling it, belongs to National Collegiate Student Loan Trust (CSLT) , which is neither a lender nor a servicer but an investment opportunity: It's essentially a bucket of private loans, which are sold off as bonds to investors . Right now, the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts - which includes 15 trusts - holds nearly $12 billion in student debt, more than all the stars in the Milky Way.

When I learn that CSLT owns the loan, I imagine the people who have benefited from the events that upended my life. These investors are likely the same people that escaped to second homes during each of the pandemic's sharp peaks. As ICUs filled up, as lungs broke down, as the poorest in the country struggled to breathe, they ordered in their groceries, worked from home offices with ergonomic chairs and stand-up desks. Their isolation tethered to the exposure of others. One body in exchange for another.

Those who've been most at risk in the pandemic are the same people with shifting red skies above their own heads: They are working class, they are Black people, Indigenous people, Latinx people; they are people whose race or economic position has forced them into frontline jobs. They are people whose debt makes their bodies more vulnerable to the virus to begin with.

"We'll get this figured out," Todd says to me before we hang up. His belief in justice encourages me, even though this time, he might be wrong.

These days, my mother and I see one another twice a year. Once, in mid-summer for a three-day weekend when we take walks along Lake Michigan, comment on how high the water is, how small the stretch of beach that guards the housing along the bluff. My mother is always tanned from the hours she spends walking along the lakeshore, collecting rocks that she'll glue to picture frames, lamps, candleholders, and doormats. In the years following her incarceration, my sister moved away, and my father and her moved into a rental across town after losing their home to bankruptcy. Then he died of cancer, and so did one of her cats. Another disappeared into the purple-blue of the early evening, never to return. Now, on summer weekends, my mother sells these rock items at art fairs where mostly out-of-town rich people buy them to commemorate their vacations on the lake. To supplement her small art fair income, she cleans homes for other rich people, scrubbing away the memories of family BBQs and beach days to make room for the next. I wonder if the homes and her art are painful and constant reminders of a domestic life that's been altered.

A red balloon for each dollar: 125,000 balloons, enough to fill a city block. They follow me as I walk around the city, west on 77th to the train station or east on 77th to the river.

I see her a second time at Christmas, driving 10 snowy hours from Minnesota to a house remade into a memory - each wall, shelf, and furniture decorated with a Christmas-something from my youth. As we prepare the deviled eggs for the family dinner, I compliment her on the Nativity scene or tree lights, and she always says, "It's just not the same putting them out by myself. Next year, maybe I won't." My cousins, uncle, and sister join us for dinner, and we swap stories of our distant lives across the midwest. At some point in the evening, when I'm telling a funny or detailed story, I look up to find my mother watching me, hungrily taking in these narrative threads. For this has been the true cost of what she stole from me: She doesn't really know me.

We talk on the phone once a month or so, and when people ask me why we still talk at all, I give them a constellation of incomplete but honest answers: I can't bear her loneliness; she's suffered enough; she, too, was a victim - of addiction and a predatory lending system; I love her. When she and I talk it's not about much. Mostly, I ask her questions about her art or my grandmother who has Alzheimer's and whom she cares for. We don't talk about the debt that is all around us, trapping us, shouting at us so loud we can hardly hear. Despite trying my best to kill it so that we can escape, it lives, and though it was born from us - her decision acted upon my body - it seems to live beyond us now, dwelling in the data systems of lenders and banks and credit reports. Sometimes, I want to yell to my mother above its roar: I am so, so sorry. An apology big enough to hold it all, big enough for both of us. But I don't.

COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated existing crises - brought about by our economic, political, and healthcare systems, our inability to contend with and repair our history as a slave-state, and brought about by debt. Any ongoing relief efforts that don't address the complex relationship between disease, vulnerability, and indebtedness don't go far enough. Canceling student debt would be a start. As I type this, the total federal student loan debt is $1,811,629,805,092 , but in a few seconds, that number will be inaccurate, and in a week or month even more so. The debt grows rapidly. Unable to exchange those numbers for narratives, all I can say is that those loans are owned by people who want to go to school, who want very badly to have agency, to lead meaningful lives.

Through an executive order, President Biden could cancel all federal student debt. At any moment of any day. This declaration won't impact my private debt, but it could change the lives of millions of others. Though lenders, servicers, and trusts make students into investments, into delinquents, into lists of interest and payment, Biden's jubilee can do the opposite: see us as humans.

Heal us, free us, give us back our bodies.

***
Kristin Collier is a Minneapolis-based educator and essayist. She's currently at work on a book about student debt.

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I open the email at 9:30 a.m. in my retrofitted, windowless office on the second floor of a high school in St. Paul. The fluorescent lights are so bright and the walls so white that sometimes I look up from my computer screen and feel as if I'm in a dream.

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Opinion | Death Changed My Life (Published 2022)

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I see now that life is a series of peaks and valleys and it is a fool’s errand to try to flatten them out.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/why-enes-kanter-freedom-speaks/620940/

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When Turkey's leader came after me and my family, the United States welcomed me with open arms.

When I first arrived in the United States, I had to adjust to a new language, new norms, and new traditions. But I was perhaps most stunned by a simple comment a teammate made. He criticized President Barack Obama, which I feared could have landed him in prison. He smiled and said: "This isn't Turkey, brother. You have the freedom to say whatever you want."

Americans might find the thought absurd, but the threat of prison is all too real for those living under authoritarian rule around the world. Since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became president of Turkey in 2014, after more than a decade as prime minister, at least 12,881 people have been convicted of the crime of insulting the president. Thousands have been sent to prison, including children, for offenses as trivial as posting something on social media that might hurt the feelings of an emotionally fragile dictator.

Over the past five years, Erdoğan has all but stamped out free expression in Turkey. He's made Turkey one of the world's worst jailers of journalists, imprisoning hundreds. Erdoğan's regime has shut down more than 160 media outlets and hundreds of human-rights groups. Turkey's dystopian new internet law gives the regime complete control over users' data and enables online censorship. A current proposal would criminalize the spreading of so-called fake news online with up to five years in prison. Erdoğan has targeted every defender of freedom in my country. His regime has persecuted, jailed, and even tortured tens of thousands of educators, lawyers, judges, public officials, and activists after labeling them "terrorists." And it has targeted me.
From the December 2021 issue: The bad guys are winning
Erdoğan went after my family because I dared to speak up. He forced my parents to publicly disown me. The words in a handwritten note from my dad in 2016 cut me to my core: "With a feeling of shame, I apologize to our president and the Turkish people for having such a son." My siblings were blocked from employment. My dad was fired, later jailed, and then ultimately released in 2020. But he emerged from his cell a completely different person, unable to speak about his experiences. I have not seen or spoken with my parents since 2015. Any contact with me could have them arrested.

I could have fallen victim to Turkey's ruthless campaign of transnational repression as well. Erdoğan's regime is infamous for hunting down dissidents across the globe. In 2017, on a basketball trip to Indonesia, I received a tip to leave the country immediately, to avoid a suspected kidnapping attempt by Turkish agents. On the next leg of our trip, in Europe, I was informed by border control that Turkey had revoked my citizenship. I would later learn that the regime had also issued an international arrest warrant against me.

I was stranded. I had no family. I had no nationality. I had no home.

That's when America welcomed me with open arms.

This country has given me all the opportunities in the world. Friends, teammates, journalists, politicians, and activists became my new family, united in our struggle for justice, equality, human rights, and democracy. When I started the process of becoming an American citizen, I realized that life is bigger than basketball. I decided to dedicate the power and privilege of my platform to the causes that matter-to be a voice for the voiceless.

I listened to victims and stood in solidarity with the oppressed. I marched for Black lives. I prayed with Tibetan Buddhists. I stood by democracy activists from Hong Kong and Taiwan. I heard from Uyghurs who had lost relatives or survived the torture of China's concentration camps. I fought against all forms of hate. I took to the streets. I took to the podium. I raised awareness. I used my platform. I used my voice.
Jemele Hill: Enes Kanter Freedom is letting himself be used
Human rights and democracy are under threat. Around the globe, authoritarian strongmen are getting stronger. Yet far too many celebrities, athletes, and corporations still choose their money over their morals. Speaking up for victims of authoritarian violence has somehow become controversial, just because it might alienate the perpetrators. It shouldn't take the disappearance of a former No. 1 world-tennis star for some of us to make a statement. Freedom is not about staying silent in the face of a tyrannical dictatorship that commits genocide against the Uyghurs because you prefer to preserve your business deals.

For six long years, I was without a home. I know what it's like for a people to have their freedom stripped away. And I know what it's like to have my own freedom stripped away. But this week, I'm reclaiming my Freedom. I just became an American citizen, and I'm making America and its freedoms a part of my very identity.

I'm overwhelmed with emotion just writing these words: I, Enes Kanter Freedom, am proud to be a citizen of the United States of America, the land of the free, and home of the brave.

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When Turkey's leader came after me and my family, the United States welcomed me with open arms. When I first arrived in the United States, I had to adjust to a new language, new norms, and new traditions. But I was perhaps most stunned by a simple comment a teammate made.

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My Mother's Fried Chicken Was a Link to My Pass--and My Daughter's Future | Kwame Alexander

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My Mother's Fried Chicken Was a Link to My Pass--and My Daughter's Future | Kwame Alexander

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Frying chicken right is like riding a bike backward. Or writing a sonnet. It's hard, sometimes elusive-but in the face of loss, it can also be life-giving.

This is All on the Table, a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community.

The last meal I shared with my mother was in a capacious hospital room in Chesapeake, Virginia. It was breakfast time and the sun was a carefree soul galloping through the window like a wild horse. Having not eaten much in the 48 hours since she'd been admitted with complications of sarcoidosis, she was quite hungry. So I fed her. Spooned the applesauce. Placed in her mouth a few ice chips from the water glass she couldn't finish (crunching ice always gratified her). That was 2017. The year my heart broke into a million jagged puzzle pieces.

None of us is ever prepared for death. When a great tree falls, the birds, with no branch to perch on, scatter. Looking for a new home. In the four years since my graceful mother has passed, I've been searching. Thumbing through old scrapbooks, sprinkling her ashes in places we lived and traveled- Brooklyn and St. Croix and Fayetteville, North Carolina-all in an effort to find some solace. To find a new home.

In 2018, when the American School in London invited me to become its inaugural Innovator-in-Residence, I welcomed the opportunity for that solace, along with a professional reboot. I'd gotten into a writing rhythm that, while successful, felt almost too comfortable. The process of coming up with a beginning, middle, and end was akin to riding a bike for me, and I could cruise through a story, arms akimbo, head to the wind. I needed to challenge my storytelling normal, become inspired in new and exciting ways, learn to pop a wheelie.

Part of moving yourself forward in a life-giving way is to take the things from the past that have helped shape and mold you and use them as anchors to the future. My own vision of what lay ahead came during two farewell dinners hosted by friends in the summer of 2019. First, award-winning children's book illustrator Melissa Sweet crafted homemade lobster rolls the size of my arms in her palsy-walsy Maine home. Then I drove south to dine alfresco-grilled snapper, cheddar biscuits, Summer in a Bottle rosé-in celebration of Jacqueline Woodson's latest novel at her family's country estate. These two women not only burned in the kitchen, but laughed and told stories and answered phone calls and helped with homework and listened. At the same time. With the cool and calm of a river flowing in a forest. Just like my mother used to do. Determined to do the same, the new Kwame would find his way home not only by moving to London but by cooking.

In my first few weeks there, I figured out how to catch a bus to Maida Vale, write at an outdoor café while sipping English breakfast tea, and take refuge at the bottom of the London Library when it rained. I also learned to make some pretty tasty pasta-fettuccine Alfredo, spinach lasagna-that my finicky 11-year-old daughter, Samayah, actually enjoyed.

As the weeks turned to months, I discovered the best walking route to Samayah's new school. I learned how to listen and acknowledge her cries for independence and smile when she grabbed my hand and held it, our fingers braided like the cornrows her mother designed. I learned how to answer her not-so-random questions about why can't we get a car or do you have to walk me the whole way or can we have a break from pasta... and make Granny's fried chicken for dinner?

"If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you," wrote Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones. Thus, I imagined, if you read good cookbooks, good food would come out of your kitchen. So I immersed myself in a plethora of cooking primers, instructional videos, and blogs. I cooked daily while listening to music, helping Samayah with homework, and just being in the moment. My recipe file fattened. Some meals turned out delicious the first time: Fish chowder. Ghanaian red red. Lobster mac and cheese (which almost didn't happen 'cause lobster meat in London is more expensive than beluga caviar). Others required experimentation: Tuscan bread salad. Blueberry scones. Beer-battered fish. Unfortunately, my buttermilk pancakes looked, and tasted, more like crepes. Fortunately, my daughter loves crepes. But she also loves chicken, and she kept asking me to make it.

During my adolescent summers, my mother often took us to Virginia Beach where we'd spend the day building sandcastles, swimming too far out, and screaming bloody murder when we got bit by a jellyfish. Two things loom large in those memories. One was this: As hungry as we were from playing in the water, we hated getting out of it for lunch because of my mother's belief that one must wait 30 minutes to swim after eating (or face severe cramps due to lack of blood flow to the stomach and thus drown). The other: Once you bit into one of my mother's crispy, juicy fried chicken drumsticks, the complaining stopped. She charmed us.

Until she was five, Samayah was a vegetarian-until we sent her to my mother's for her own summer weekend. As the story goes, Granny packed the three visiting grandchildren into her burgundy Hyundai one Saturday morning and carted them off to Virginia Beach for a day of swimming and sandcastles. Around midday she summoned each of them from the water and handed out brown paper bags full of chicken. When Samayah came home I understood the resoluteness in her smile. "Daddy, I'm not a vegetarian anymore."

Fried chicken was one of my mother's signature dishes, as it was my grandmother's, and her grandmother's before that. Now that I wanted to continue the tradition for my daughter in my modest London kitchen, I needed the recipe. So I called around to my sisters, my aunts, even my father (who only ever lovingly made two dishes, mustard mac and cheese and tad-too-bland baked chicken). But I got the same answer from each of them: There is no recipe. They simply used a little bit of this and a little bit of that and cooked it until it was done. These reveals were often followed by joyous remembrances of picnics and Sunday dinners and family reunions, and every now and then I'd get a clue: Barbara had that cast-iron skillet. Your grandmother used Crisco. The paper bag? They say it's to better coat the chicken, but we only used it 'cause Momma used it. Garlic powder. Paprika. And don't forget the oil has gotta be hot!

This is how I began putting the pieces of my puzzle back together again. I'd go to the butcher down the block and buy six wings and two breasts one day, four thighs and five legs another. Try to remember my mother in the kitchen-her fingers covered in flour, her jubilant singing filling the room, her seasoned spirit. Imagine and reimagine the ingredients in her brown paper bag. See her placing the chicken in her pan, allowing each piece room to breathe. And every time I cooked, I felt a little bit closer to her, perched on a branch of her life.

Frying chicken right can feel like riding a bike backward. Or writing a sonnet. It's hard, sometimes elusive. But there is a form to guide you, and with practice you can find the flow. For me it took a dozen tries, and yet the ecstatic look on my kid's face when she bit into that twelfth and final chicken wing was worth the wait. She got what she'd asked for. So did I. Through cooking I'd reunited with my mother, forged a powerful kinship. It was life-giving.

This one beautiful life is a series of puzzles. If you're fortunate you get someone to show you how they fit together. If you're really lucky, when they're gone, you learn how to let their memory guide you, hug you, gather you. So that when you get sad and unsure-because this new puzzle seems undoable-at least you have the precious memories to feed you while you put the pieces back together and find your way home.

Get the Recipe:

Kwame Alexander is the poet-in-residence at NPR's 'Morning Edition' and cocreator of a Disney+ series based on his Newbery Medal-winning novel, 'The Crossover.'

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My Mother's Fried Chicken Was a Link to My Past-and My Daughter's Future

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Frying chicken right is like riding a bike backward. Or writing a sonnet. It's hard, sometimes elusive-but in the face of loss, it can also be life-giving. This is All on the Table , a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community.

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Despite the Heaviness I Carried, I Kept Stirring | Elizabeth Acevedo

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Despite the Heaviness I Carried, I Kept Stirring | Elizabeth Acevedo

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This is All on the Table, a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community.

It was my job to trim the ruffled edges off the boiled lasagna sheets. My mother-a cook so particular she once remade the chicken at a friend's dinner party because it looked "too pale"-does not abide by anything but straight-edged pasta. "It's the only way to get an even texture," she'd say, and that was important when it came to lasagna de carne, the centerpiece of our family's annual New Year's Eve feast.

From a young age I considered cooking to be Mami's domain and hers alone. Oh, I'd chop beets for the ensalada rusa and grate carrots for the macaroni salad, but I was just following orders until she turned her back and I could return to my novels and video games.

Every New Year's Eve my father would buy almonds and chestnuts, a well-worn nutcracker at the ready. There would be ice-cold beers and Manischewitz, his preferred holiday wine. With Mami's alchemy filling the air-garlicky tomatoes smothered in bubbly cheese-we'd begin getting ready. Hair in rollers, button-down shirts, a family of pomp and circumstance even if the only place we'd party was our tiny two-bedroom in Morningside Heights. We greeted the new year as a unit: eyes on the TV, incense in the air, stomachs full.

Then came New Year's Eve 2009. The year we unbecame who we'd been.

Back home in New York for winter break, I was with a few sorority sisters when my eldest sibling called: My brother Rob was in the hospital. He'd had another episode.

For over a year we'd all watched as Rob struggled. He'd become silent. Fascinated with dark rooms. Full of angry, baseless accusations. He was never violent, but harm comes in many forms. Doctors from New York-Presbyterian told us that they believed it was paranoid schizophrenia.

We are a Dominican-ass family, quite superstitious. Pennies on our foreheads to stop nosebleeds. Sacraments to guarantee entry to heaven. My mother still strongly believes dreams tell us when someone's going to die. But we had no experience dealing with mental health.

My parents called 911 on December 30. I joined them at the hospital, then went home while they handled the paperwork. The kitchen was in disarray; Mami had been preparing beef for the lasagna when things got hectic. She'd managed to get it into the fridge, but that was all.

I don't know why I did it. We did not have much to celebrate. There were no chestnuts, no music. Perhaps I thought the only thing holding us loosely together was the idea of a better day, a better decade, better care that might result in better health for a beloved. Perhaps I just wanted to scramble toward normal, grasp onto a bit of comfort and routine. So I tried to remember the basic steps: the boiling, the removal of crinkles, the vamping up of jarred tomato sauce. The layers and layers. Alone, I stacked my grief. I cooked through tears. By the time my mother returned from the hospital, I was elbow deep in ground beef.

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Despite the Heaviness I Carried, I Kept Stirring

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This is All on the Table , a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community. It was my job to trim the ruffled edges off the boiled lasagna sheets. My mother-a cook so particular she once remade the chicken at a friend's dinner party because it looked "too pale"-does not abide by anything but straight-edged pasta.

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A story-style essay about why to be kind to customer service workers.

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In the late eighties, my job involved going out in public dressed as a tuxedoed dairy product. Children ran from me.

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A Quick Note on Getting Better at Difficult Things | Ta-Nehisi Coates

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A Quick Note on Getting Better at Difficult Things | Ta-Nehisi Coates

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A Quick Note on Getting Better at Difficult Things

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Feelings of greatness come and go, so savor them.

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Jennifer Lawrence: "Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co-Stars?"

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Jennifer Lawrence: "Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co-Stars?"

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When Lena first brought up the idea of Lenny to me, I was excited. Excited to speak to Lena, who I think is a genius, and excited to start thinking about what to complain about (that's not what she pitched me, it's just what I'm gonna do). When it comes to the subject of feminism, I've remained ever-so-slightly quiet. I don't like joining conversations that feel like they're "trending." I'm even the asshole who didn't do anything about the ice-bucket challenge - which was saving lives - because it started to feel more like a "trend" than a cause. I should have written a check, but I fucking forgot, okay? I'm not perfect. But with a lot of talk comes change, so I want to be honest and open and, fingers crossed, not piss anyone off.

It's hard for me to speak about my experience as a working woman because I can safely say my problems aren't exactly relatable. When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn't get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn't want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don't need. (I told you it wasn't relatable, don't hate me).

But if I'm honest with myself, I would be lying if I didn't say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn't want to seem "difficult" or "spoiled." At the time, that seemed like a fine idea, until I saw the payroll on the Internet and realized every man I was working with definitely didn't worry about being "difficult" or "spoiled." This could be a young-person thing. It could be a personality thing. I'm sure it's both. But this is an element of my personality that I've been working against for years, and based on the statistics, I don't think I'm the only woman with this issue. Are we socially conditioned to behave this way? We've only been able to vote for what, 90 years? I'm seriously asking - my phone is on the counter and I'm on the couch, so a calculator is obviously out of the question. Could there still be a lingering habit of trying to express our opinions in a certain way that doesn't "offend" or "scare" men?

A few weeks ago at work, I spoke my mind and gave my opinion in a clear and no-bullshit way; no aggression, just blunt. The man I was working with (actually, he was working for me) said, "Whoa! We're all on the same team here!" As if I was yelling at him. I was so shocked because nothing that I said was personal, offensive, or, to be honest, wrong. All I hear and see all day are men speaking their opinions, and I give mine in the same exact manner, and you would have thought I had said something offensive.

I'm over trying to find the "adorable" way to state my opinion and still be likable! Fuck that. I don't think I've ever worked for a man in charge who spent time contemplating what angle he should use to have his voice heard. It's just heard. Jeremy Renner, Christian Bale, and Bradley Cooper all fought and succeeded in negotiating powerful deals for themselves. If anything, I'm sure they were commended for being fierce and tactical, while I was busy worrying about coming across as a brat and not getting my fair share. Again, this might have NOTHING to do with my vagina, but I wasn't completely wrong when another leaked Sony email revealed a producer referring to a fellow lead actress in a negotiation as a "spoiled brat." For some reason, I just can't picture someone saying that about a man.

*Jennifer Lawrence is an Academy Award-winning actress.*

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Jennifer Lawrence: "Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co‑Stars?"

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When Lena first brought up the idea of Lenny to me, I was excited. Excited to speak to Lena, who I think is a genius, and excited to start thinking about what to complain about (that's not what she pitched me, it's just what I'm gonna do).

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The Paradox of Being a Leafs Fan | The Walrus

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The Paradox of Being a Leafs Fan | The Walrus

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Generations of Indigenous fans have followed the Toronto Maple Leafs through close calls and decades of despair. Ultimately, it's the hope that connects us

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Personal essay: How Ramen got me Through Adolescence 

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Personal essay: How Ramen got me Through Adolescence 

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How Ramen Got Me Through Adolescence (Published 2014)

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I had two sources of warmth during the cold middle-school years: a cocoon of books and a bowl of shelf-stable noodles.

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Richard Wagemese

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Warning: Language might be an issue. Great for sports fans.

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Getting traded sucks.

Like, I won't lie - I wasn't looking to leave Chicago. I enjoyed playing for the Cubs, enjoyed the city, enjoyed Wrigley..... plus I'd already changed teams last offseason. I wasn't exactly dying to do it twice in a year. So when I saw Jed's name pop up on my caller I.D. over the All-Star break, my heart kind of sank a little. We'd been losing, and I'd heard the same rumors as everyone else - that the Cubs were going to be sellers.

Turns out the rumors were true. Jed thanked me for my time with the club, and told me that the Braves had come after me hard. So they were moving me to Atlanta.

Atlanta??? Man, I was pretty surprised. At the time, the Braves were a game under .500. They were third in the division - 4½ back. And they'd just lost Acuña, an MVP-caliber player, for the rest of the season. In my mind, I was thinking, you know, No offense.... but shouldn't these guys be sellers, too?? I actually remember one of the first things that somebody said to me when I got there: "Don't get too comfortable."

Translation: If things don't turn around, you might be getting traded all over again.

Slowly but surely, though..... things turned around.

It wasn't anything crazy at first. No huge winning streak out of the gate. No dramatic changes. It wasn't like in the movies where the music hits and the team just rips off a bunch of W's. It was more of a gradual thing, you know what I mean? It's like at some point we just started winning a little more than we were losing.

And then it's funny - I remember about a month after the trade, we're a few games over .500 and on a long road trip. And I was playing cards on the plane with some of the pitchers. The plane ride ended, and then from there it's like, the team has two buses: one for pitchers and one for position players. I wanted to keep playing cards with those guys, though - so I hopped in with them instead. And we're on the bus, playing cards, talking trash, you know..... when at some point someone asks me, "Wait. Why are you on the pitchers bus?" And I wasn't really even thinking about it. We were just having a good time, I guess, and I was in one of those moods.

But I said: "Because y'all are the motherf*ckers who are going to win us a World Series."

I think we won like six games in a row after that.

And I'm bringing that story up, not because I'm trying to say that that's what jump-started all of this. Obviously not. We're here because this is one hell of a baseball team - and guys have been playing great when it's mattered most.

But I also think, in terms of looking at success, that sometimes some of the "other stuff" can be underrated.

Like.... baseball seasons are long, man. They're a serious grind. Things can get stale. And I think over the course of a long season, it's stuff like culture, like swagger, like vibes, like whatever you want to call it - it's stuff like that that can actually make a pretty big difference. Stuff like that can get everybody's energy right.

And if there's one thing that I think I've been able to bring to this team, beyond just my bat and my glove, I'd say it's that energy - and that belief: That nothing is as dangerous in baseball as a team with a ton of confidence.

Y'all are the motherf*ckers who are going to win us a World Series.
- Joc Pederson

I'll give you another example real quick. So we're in L.A. for a series near the end of the summer - and my wife has this great stylist there who comes to the house to do hers and the kids' hair. And since I'm around, the stylist asks if I want to do anything with mine. I probably would have just said no.... but then I remember something.

So, back when I was in Chicago, Rizzo had this idea: that halfway through the year, we needed to go blonde. "Trust me, good things happen when you go blonde." Not sure if he fact-checked that, or where it came from, but he'd always be saying it. Then I got traded, though, and he did too, so it never happened. But now flash-forward - it's late August, I'm kind of grinding, not hitting like I should be..... and I remember the blonde thing with Rizzo. So I'm like, alright - why not. I tell my wife's hair stylist, "Let's switch it up." Went blonde.

The guys in the bullpen saw it, and had my walk-up song changed to "The Real Slim Shady." The fans caught on to it, and of course did their thing. The whole team got a kick out of it. And then also..... it kind of worked???

Very next game, I hit a home run off Buehler.

Rizzo texts me right after, thrilled - as if I proved his theory, and we discovered a major breakthrough in science or something. And I'm not saying we did......

But at the same time: It really has just been that kind of season, man.

Like, it's been an incredible run - game in, game out. It's been so many different guys stepping up in so many different moments. It's been us getting MVP-type seasons from Albies and Riley. It's been Soler legitimately carrying us for stretches. It's been Freddie taking Hader deep to send us to the NLCS. It's been Adrianza coming through with that pinch-hit double.... then Eddie hitting the bomb that changed everything. It's been Matzek, in an elimination game, giving us two of the most ridiculous shutdown innings you'll ever see. It's been Will slamming the door on some of the best lineups in baseball. It's been Dansby flashing the glove to get that final out. It's been the entire pitching staff, frankly.

It's been championship-level baseball, up and down the roster.

But when I look back on these last few months, and when I look ahead to this World Series in front of us - what stands out to me, just as much, is the little things.

What stands out to me is the stuff that you can't see in a box score.

It's the front office believing in this group just crazily enough to be buyers at the trade deadline with a team that was under .500. It's our security guys coming up to me during my very first batting practice, and saying how glad they were to have me on board. It's Ian Anderson convincing me to change my walk-up music to "Way 2 Sexy," and then promising, "It's gonna bang." It's the white pearls becoming..... whatever the white pearls have become (shoutout to Gabe, my jeweler). It's "Wine Club," this thing that me and a few guys have started, where after each big playoff win we'll crack open a new bottle. It's Poppy, my three-year-old daughter, running out onto the field after we clinched the pennant and letting me know, "Dada, the Braves won! You played good defense!" It's a couple of former teammates I'm really close to, coming up to me postgame and saying, "Hey - I love you. Now go beat the Astros for us."

And it's the city of Atlanta, being absolutely electric, every single night at Truist, and matching our energy when we've needed it most.

Obviously I don't know what's coming next - it's impossible to predict what's going to happen over these next four, five, six, seven games.

I like our chances, though.

Because, yeah - we might not be a superteam. We might have only won 88 games. We might have had our share of injuries, and slipped below some people's radars, and taken an unconventional path to get to this stage.

But we also just might be those motherf*ckers.

And no one's beat us yet.

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Getting traded sucks. Like, I won't lie - I wasn't looking to leave Chicago. I enjoyed playing for the Cubs, enjoyed the city, enjoyed Wrigley..... plus I'd already changed teams last offseason. I wasn't exactly dying to do it twice in a year. So when I saw Jed's name pop up on my caller I.D.

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Opinion | I Am Not Proof of the American Dream (Published 2022)

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For poor kids today, the path I took through education no longer exists.

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Digging in the Trash — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER

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A new kind of magazine for a new kind of South.

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Opinion | My Young Mind Was Disturbed by a Book. It Changed My Life. (Published 2022)

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Books are not inert tools of pedagogy. They are mind-changing, world-changing.

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"God creates the world and say on Saturday afternoon he must separatethe animals from man so he creates a sudden chasm like an earthquake that leaves man on one side and the animals on the other. And while the chasm's open, dog jumps over and stands by man. And that's the way it's gonna be. That's the way it's gotta be."-Barry Hannah

C h arles Thomas didn't so much jump a chasm as crawl out from under a single-wide in Cherokee, North Carolina, in desperate need of an orthodontist. Mouth closed, his teeth protrude from all sides like some wild boar-sand tiger shark love child gooned out on methamphetamine. It's those teeth and a mouth not fit to chew that make eating a full-time job. Every day's the sa me old struggle: Grab five pieces of kibble, drop four, swallow one, over and over, till the bowl's empty.

I live in an old white clapboard farmhouse on forty acres of pasture where the owners keep two horses and fifteen head of cattle. All his life, Charles-a.k.a. Charlie, Stinkpot, Chuck, Chuckwagon, Charlie Britches, Charles T, and Chaz-has had the run of the place. Mornings are for napping, flat on his back with his feet sprawled toward the sky. Late afternoon, he takes a soak like an old man in the horse trough. Soon as the sun's down, he's ready to run anything that moves-foxes, possums, coons, and twice last summer, a skunk that either loved him like Pepé Le Pew or absolutely hated my guts.

I guess Charlie's my stepson in that I was lucky enough to fall in love with the woman who raised him. Ashley always jokes that the real reason I'm with her is because of her dog, and while that's not entirely true, I will say I love that wiry bastard about as much as a man can love anything.

Charlie was indeed found beneath a trailer, part of a litter that was brought to an animal rescue, where he and twenty-one other puppies were set to be euthanized. A woman at the shelter put them all in a box and took it upon herself to find them homes. It was the middle of January, and Ashley was at a bonfire party and that's where the puppies wound up. She picked Charles out of the box, primarily on account of his crooked teeth, and he slept curled against her that night in the back of her SUV. They woke the next morning with two inches of snow on the ground, each keeping the other warm, and he's had her heart ever since.

The woman who rescued Charles from the shelter remembers his mother being a Jack Russell-beagle mix, and as a pup he carried those brown and tan markings. When I first saw him at eight years old, however, no telltale signs of breed remained. He's pink skinned, bronze eyed, wirehaired, and tinged white, the color of heavy cream, twenty-seven pounds of questionable lineage built for slipping beneath barbed-wire fence at twenty miles an hour. Since the day Chaz and I met three years ago, the two of us have been inseparable. I walk the farm; he's right beside me. I lie down at night; he's a few feet away. I hop in the truck; he's riding shotgun. Charlie holds to my heels like a shadow.

When Chaz came into my life, I was seeing a psychologist twice a week to work my way through a depression and anxiety I've carried since I was a kid. One of the main reasons I started going was because my life as a novelist requires that I do things outside my comfort zone. I don't like crowds or being surrounded, because I can't keep eyes on everyone around me. I prefer my back to the wall. I don't like traveling to unfamiliar places, or being in a room where I don't know the exits. I always have to have a plan to get out. For the most part, I don't like interacting with people. Unfortunately, those traits make it hard to tear off on a book tour spanning nineteen cities in twenty-one days, so I've done my best to cope.

I grew up to a country people who'd been swallowed by a city. My father's family settled in and around Charlotte, North Carolina, in the late 1700s. Most of my ancestors worked tobacco and cotton, dirt-poor sharecroppers who broke their backs to survive. When I was a kid, in the shadows of skyscrapers, my uncle still kept a kennel of hounds to run rabbit each fall. I grew up tromping across a pasture of chest-high field grass to fish a farm pond most evenings. Where I lived was a tiny holdout spot of country in an ever-expanding cityscape. Drugs and violence were just a stone's throw away, and I found myself slap-dab in the middle of it most my life.

I was twelve or thirteen the first time I had a gun put to my head. I was in eighth grade. I was at school. The science teacher had sent me outside to find things we could look at under a microscope-dried leaves, empty snail shells, dirt clods, dead bugs. I can't really remember what the man looked like. I think he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. What I remember clearly is the gun. A small snub-nosed revolver. Black handle. Brushed-steel frame. A black hole that looked like it stretched on forever. He walked right up and shoved that wheel gun into my temple and what I felt in that moment has hung around my neck ever since.

Here's the thing about trauma: No one experiences the same event in the same way. Everyone processes things differently so that the moments that impacted me most as a child might not have affected others near as severely.

For Chaz, I think the trigger event might have been being abandoned as a puppy underneath that trailer. He doesn't like being left alone. If I'm on the road, he doesn't eat. He doesn't sleep. He waits anxiously, watching the spot in the driveway where my truck should be.

When Charlie was a few years old, he fell asleep underneath a pickup. The driver unknowingly ran Chaz over and crushed one of his hind legs, an injury still evident in the way that back leg slings woppyjawed every time he barrels off wide-ass open after a rabbit. As a result of that experience, though, Charles doesn't like when folks touch his hindquarters. He's fine if you scratch his back, but don't reach for that leg. He gets awfully spooky around cars. Truth is he's awfully spooky most the time.

What I'm getting at is that the two of us aren't all that different. I tell folks that Chaz and I are two peas in an anxiety-ridden pod, and I guess we're codependents in that way. He takes me on walkabouts through the pasture where I can smell flowers, and I take him on rides to the dump where he can sniff trash. He shows me the red fox in field grass, and I show him thirty-pound flathead catfish that could eat him alive. In winter, I set my rabbit boxes by trails he uncovers nose to ground.

In the summer, I lead him to mountain streams filled with speckled trout and let him collapse along edges of current to cool off.

Loneliness is the root of the anxious heart. It's that helpless feeling, that lack of control, that I'm-all-alone-in-this-spinning-world-and-there's-nothing-to-stop-its-whirling sort of feeling that bears down with an unfathomable weight and holds the anxious hostage. But when I look across the cab of my truck and see Chaz with his head out the window, the wiry hairs of his beard licking about his face like the tail of a white-hot comet, I don't feel the way I used to feel. When it's just the two of us, everything that I once carried has been laid aside.

Looking at the relationship man has had with the natural world, the domestication of dog may be the only thing we ever got right. Scientists don't agree on when and how it happened. Some say as far back as thirty thousand years ago, others say ten thousand. Some argue there was a single event, all dogs following a solitary lineage, while others argue multiple events occurred, various groups of wolves becoming domesticated by different people in different places. However it happened, the greatest truth to come from that moment is what I know every time Chaz rams his dirty face into the side of my leg and offers up that crooked-toothed smile. Ever since dog jumped the chasm and stood at our side, this has been the gift given by dog to man, a gift that, when we're lucky, we can return: Never again must we be alone.

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"God creates the world and say on Saturday afternoon he must separatethe animals from man so he creates a sudden chasm like an earthquake that leaves man on one side and the animals on the other. And while the chasm's open, dog jumps over and stands by man.

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There's a good chance you do not need a rundown of the basics of the online game Wordle. You have perhaps seen it appear in your Twitter timeline as cryptic posts from people you know, made up of little green, yellow and black boxes - these are people posting their results. If you ever played the board-and-peg game Mastermind as a kid, it's pretty much that, only with words, and while it's certainly not an idea no one has ever had, the implementation of it that has taken off in recent weeks has been pretty wild.

Here's the short version: You have six chances to guess a five-letter word. With each guess, the game tells you which letters are correct letters in the right spot (green squares), which letters are correct letters in the wrong spot (yellow squares) and which letters are not in the word at all (gray squares). For instance, if the word is LIGHT and you guess GLOAT, you will get yellow-yellow-gray-gray-green squares, showing you that the word has an L and a G, but not in those spots, and that it has a T at the end where you put it. A new game is released every day, so everybody is playing the same one at the same time.

It did not take long for me to conclude that Wordle is a metaphor for life, meaning that you can learn a lot about different ways to see the world from different ways to play Wordle. (If you are inclined to attribute this discovery on my part to prolonged social isolation along with seasonal madness as I stay inside my house to avoid breaking my kneecap while walking my dog across crusty snow and ice, I say: Stay out of my private thoughts, you.)

For one thing, there is easy mode, and there is hard mode. You switch between them by toggling a setting. The difference is that in hard mode, you have to incorporate the letters you've already gotten into your next guess, so that every guess could plausibly be right, based on what you know. This means, for instance, that if you guess RENTS on your first try and you learn that the first letter is indeed an R, then you can't guess BALMY on your next try just to see if you can nail down some more letters. You are constrained to guesses that include that R. If you post your results after playing in hard mode, they appear with a little asterisk. "This person played on HARD MODE," the game tells all your friends, just to make sure that they know without your having to communicate it to them. It is the humblebrag of Wordle.

But of course, you can choose to play in hard mode without switching the game to hard mode. You can play in hard mode on the honor system. This means that you will not get your little asterisk next to your results, but you will know you played on hard mode. You will know you carefully incorporated each piece of information into your next guess. As often happens in life, you are presented with a choice between telling everyone that you overcame an obstacle and smugly knowing and keeping to yourself the delicious knowledge that you overcame an obstacle. (Perhaps you can tell from this description which I prefer.)

There is also the matter of risk. The disadvantage of playing on easy mode is that if you make that leap from RENTS to BALMY with the information that the final word contains an R, you know that BALMY is not the final answer. You are knowingly giving up your opportunity to get the prized notification that you got the answer right in only two guesses, which is the smallest number that incorporates any skill. You are making a guess you already know is not going to turn all green and wiggle its letters up and down at you in excitement the way a correct guess will. If you are a person who always wants to keep the dream alive of that 2 score, then you want to go from RENTS to, say, ROYAL, because it could actually be ROYAL! You are flying without a net! ROYAL could be correct! But if you guess BALMY, you have a better shot at getting another letter to join that R - the better to position yourself for your third guess.

Would you rather play it safe and BALMY and be better equipped to avoid the difficult six-guess day or the dreaded didn't-even-get-it-on-the-sixth-guess day; or would you rather bet on yourself, on your capacity for glory, and fly Top Gun-style into battle with your ROYAL flag waving?

And how superstitious are you? Some people start every day with the very same first guess, usually something like CARTS or TRAIN that has a lot of common letters in it. Other people (I am one of these) take a different stab at it every day.

And do you think you need a method, a trick, a hack, a secret strategy? I am strangely preoccupied with last letters, myself. Once I have a sense of where one letter might be, it's surprising how often the possible last letters begin to contract in number. But in all likelihood, this is no better as a solution strategy than anything else; I just like it. Because it's how I do it. It's how I Wordle. And I've been Wordling for about ... two weeks. So clearly, I have massive experience to draw from.

All I'm saying is this: Your approach to this word game is critically important. Just critically important. At least that's what I tell myself when I wake up with insomnia at 4:30 in the morning and think, "Ooh, I can play Wordle!"

If you liked this excerpt from NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, consider subscribing to our newsletterto get recommendations on what's making us happy every week.

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Your Wordle strategy says a lot about how you see the world

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There's a good chance you do not need a rundown of the basics of the online game Wordle. You have perhaps seen it appear in your Twitter timeline as cryptic posts from people you know, made up of little green, yellow and black boxes - these are people posting their results.

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Video: Opinion | The No Good, Very Bad Truth About the Internet and Our Kids

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Our kids are at the mercy of tech companies, with only an outdated law to protect them.

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This is personal essay mixed with review.

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There is something to be said about a truly disastrous meal, a meal forever indelible in your memory because it's so uniquely bad, it can only be deemed an achievement. The sort of meal where everyone involved was definitely trying to do something; it's just not entirely clear what.

I'm not talking about a meal that's poorly cooked, or a server who might be planning your murder-that sort of thing happens in the fat lump of the bell curve of bad. Instead, I'm talking about the long tail stuff - the sort of meals that make you feel as though the fabric of reality is unraveling. The ones that cause you to reassess the fundamentals of capitalism, and whether or not you're living in a simulation in which someone failed to properly program this particular restaurant. The ones where you just know somebody's going to lift a metal dome off a tray and reveal a single blue or red pill.

I'm talking about those meals.

At some point, the only way to regard that sort of experience-without going mad-is as some sort of community improv theater. You sit in the audience, shouting suggestions like, "A restaurant!" and "Eating something that resembles food" and "The exchange of money for goods, and in this instance the goods are a goddamn meal! " All of these suggestion go completely ignored.

That is how I've come to regard our dinner at Bros, Lecce's only Michelin-starred restaurant, as a means of preserving what's left of my sanity. It wasn't dinner. It was just dinner theater.

No, scratch that. Because dinner was not involved. I mean-dinner played a role, the same way Godot played a role in Beckett's eponymous play. The entire evening was about it, and guess what? IT NEVER SHOWED.

So no, we can't call it dinner theater. Instead, we will say it was just theater.

Very, very expensive theater.

I realize that not everyone is willing or able to afford a ticket to Waiting for Gateau and so this post exists, to spare you our torment. We had plenty of beautiful meals in Lecce that were not this one, and if you want a lovely meal out, I'll compile a list shortly.

But for now, let us rehash whatever the hell this was.

We headed to the restaurant with high hopes - eight of us in total, led into a cement cell of a room, Drake pumping through invisible speakers. It was sweltering hot, and no other customers were present. The décor had the of chicness of an underground bunker where one would expect to be interrogated for the disappearance of an ambassador's child.

Earlier that day, we'd seen a statue of a bear, chiseled into marble centuries ago, by someone who had never actually seen a bear. This is the result:

And this is a perfect allegory for our evening. It's as though someone had read about food and restaurants, but had never experienced either, and this was their attempt to recreate it.

What followed was a 27-course meal (note that "course" and "meal" and "27" are being used liberally here) which spanned 4.5 hours and made me feel like I was a character in a Dickensian novel. Because - I cannot impart this enough - there was nothing even close to an actual meal served. Some "courses" were slivers of edible paper. Some shots were glasses of vinegar. Everything tasted like fish, even the non-fish courses. And nearly everything, including these noodles, which was by far the most substantial dish we had, was served cold.

Amassing two-dozen of them together amounted to a meal the same way amassing two-dozen toddlers together amounts to one middle-aged adult.

I've checked Trip Advisor. Other people who've eaten at Bros were served food. Some of them got meat, and ravioli, and more than one slice of bread. Some of them were served things that needed to be eaten with forks and spoons.

We got a tablespoon of crab.

I've tried to come up with hypotheses for what happened. Maybe the staff just ran out of food that night. Maybe they confused our table with that of their ex-lover's. Maybe they were drunk. But we got twelve kinds of foam, something that I can only describe as "an oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport", and a teaspoon of savory ice cream that was olive flavored.

I'm still not over that, to be honest. I thought it was going to be pistachio.

There is no menu at Bros. Just a blank newspaper with a QR code linking to a video featuring one of the chefs, presumably, against a black background, talking directly into the camera about things entirely unrelated to food. He occasionally used the proper noun of the restaurant as an adverb, the way a Smurf would. This means that you can't order anything besides the tasting menu, but also that you are at the mercy of the servers to explain to you what the hell is going on.

The servers will not explain to you what the hell is going on.

They will not do this in Italian. They will not do this in English. They will not play Pictionary with you on the blank newspaper as a means of communicating what you are eating. On the rare occasion where they did offer an explanation for a dish, it did not help.

"These are made with rancid ricotta," the server said, a tiny fried cheese ball in front of each of us.

"I'm... I'm sorry, did you say rancid? You mean... fermented? Aged?"

"No. Rancid."

"Okay," I said in Italian. "But I think that something might be lost in translation. Because it can't be-"

"Rancido," he clarified.

Another course - a citrus foam - was served in a plaster cast of the chef's mouth. Absent utensils, we were told to lick it out of the chef's mouth in a scene that I'm pretty sure was stolen from an eastern European horror film.

For reasons that could fill an entire volume of TimeLife Mysteries of the Unknown, THIS ITEM IS AVAILABLE FOR SALE AT THEIR GIFTSHOP. In case you want to have a restraining order filed against you this holiday season.

Now, at this point, I may have started quietly freaking out. A hierarchical pecking order was being established, and when you're the one desperately slurping sustenance out of the plaster cast of someone else's mouth, it's safe to say you are at the bottom of that pyramid. We'd been beaten into some sort of weird psychological submission. Like the Stanford Prison Experiment but with less prison and more aspic. That's the only reason I have for why we didn't leave during any of these incidents:

When a member of our party stood up during the lengthy stretch between courses to go have a cigarette outside, and was scolded to sit down.

When one member of our party was served nothing for three consecutive courses, because they couldn't figure out how to accommodate her food allergies.

When Rand was served food he was allergic to, repeatedly, because they didn't care enough to accommodate his.

When a server reprimanded me for eating. These reconstituted orange slices (one per person) were a course. I asked if I could eat the real orange that had been served alongside it (we'd all gotten one, and I, at this point, was extremely hungry). "Yes," the server said, annoyed. "But you aren't really supposed to." He let me have two segments and then whisked the fruit away.

No, we just sat there while the food was portioned out a teaspoon at a time, a persistent and sustained sort of agony, like slowly peeling off a band-aid. That's the problem with a tasting menu. With so many courses, you just assume things are going to turn around. Every dish is a chance for redemption. Maybe this meal was like Nic Cage's career - you have to wait a really long time for the good stuff, but there is good stuff.

BUT NO. We kept waiting for someone to bring us something - anything! - that resembled dinner. Until the exact moment when we realized: it would never come. It was when our friend Lisa tried to order another bottle of wine.

"Would you like red or white?" the server asked.

"What are we having for the main?" she inquired.

His face blanched.

"The... main, madame? Um... we're about to move on to dessert."

We sat for a moment, letting this truth settle over us. Because by now it had been hours, and at no point had we been served anything that could be considered dinner. (There was one time when I thought it might happen - the staff placed dishes in front of us, and then swirled sauces on the dishes, and I clapped my hands, excitedly waiting for something to be plated atop those beautiful sauces. Instead, someone came by with an eyedropper and squirted drops of gelee onto our plates).

"We've infused these droplets with meat molecules," the server explained, and left.

I don't know if our experience was the norm. I've looked TripAdvisor's photo for Bros, and other people who've gone there seem to have been fed actual food. Like, even this person, who was served the same weird meat droplet course, at least got it with a triangle of foamy-looking bread. Do you know what it's like to envy someone for a piece of foamy looking bread? IT'S NOT GREAT.

"There's no ... main?" Lisa said to us in disbelief after the server had retreated.

"Hey," I said, my hand resting on her arm. She was shaking slightly from low blood sugar. "It's okay."

"They haven't fucking fed us," she said, her eyes wide.

"I know, I know," I said, "But look. We're in this amazing country. And I don't know about you, but nothing is going to stop me from enjoying tonight."

She nodded.

"Because I'm surrounded by my favorite people," I said, and I squeezed Lisa's hand for emphasis, "and I'm at my favorite restaurant."

Lisa sputtered laughing. No more food was coming, but there was something freeing in that. Because this meal had never been about us to begin with. It sure as hell wasn't about the food. And there is something glorious about finally giving up.

We sat through a few more courses including a marshmallow flavored like cuttlefish, and a dish called "frozen air" which literally melted before you could eat it, which felt like a goddamn metaphor for the night.

And then someone came in and demanded we stand and exit the restaurant. Thinking we were getting kicked out, we gleefully followed. Instead, we were led across the street, to a dark doorway and into the Bros laboratory. A video of the shirtless kitchen staff doing extreme sports played on a large screen TV while a chef cut us comically tiny slivers of fake cheese.

Rand was, of course, allergic to it.

The bill arrived. The meal cost more than any other we'd eat during our trip by a magnitude of three. They'd given us balloons with the restaurant's name across it and the chef emerged and insisted on posing with us for a Polaroid that we did not ask for. We were finally released into the night, after every other restaurant had closed, ensuring that no food would be consumed that evening.

"That was abhorrent," we all agreed as we shoved the balloons into a dumpster (I'd made everyone take one, with the baffling logic that they'd somehow help offset the cost of the meal). We howled at how ridiculous it was, and how they'd poisoned Rand. How maybe we should have known that a restaurant named "Bros" was going to be a disaster.

It was like an awful show that we had front row tickets to. But wasn't there something glorious about sharing it together, the way that a terrible experience makes you all closer?

"No," someone said, and we laughed even harder.

P.S. - The next day, one of the staff tried contacting the only single female member of our party via Instagram messages. "Hey, I served you last night!" he wrote. She immediately blocked him.

Bros., Via degli Acaya, 2, 73100 Lecce LE, Italy

Cost: a rather mortifying 130-200 Euros per person

Note: the TripAdvisor reviews show a lot of elaborate courses, and these were all way, way more food than anything we ate. I cannot express to you how little we were fed, and I'm not a particularly big eater. Allergy and dietary restrictions were largely ignored.

Recommendation: Do not eat here. I cannot express this enough. This was single-handedly one of the worse wastes of money in my entire food and travel writing career bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha oh my god

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Bros., Lecce: We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever

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There is something to be said about a truly disastrous meal, a meal forever indelible in your memory because it's so uniquely bad, it can only be deemed an achievement. The sort of meal where everyone involved was definitely trying to do something; it's just not entirely clear what.

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Back to Issue Thirty
BY NOOR HINDI

" An immigrant is just a person who knows home is a verb," - Philip Metres
1. Confessions
We did not watch Baseball. My siblings learned English by watching . As a child, I learned how to dip pita bread into hummus, zait & za'atar, labneh, baba ghanoush. My family comes from a land that does not exist on a map. In my earliest memories, my father is running the blade of a knife down a prickly pear. A pomegranate. He reminds us that these are the fruits of Palestine. I knew football as f ú tbol. Not soccer. Microsoft Word would like to correct this. It would also like to correct my name, , which means light. Sometimes I remember standing on the rooftop patio in Amman, Jordan, looking at all the lights, the city hanging from the clouds. The city a mountain. My uncle was undocumented. We lived in section 8 housing. We are Muslim and sometimes we joke about blowing shit up. Sometimes my father couldn't afford school supplies. We ate ketchup sandwiches. When my parents and grandparents pray they say Allahu Akbar . My grandmother's name is . I don't like the Middle East. I don't like America. I drank too many Little Hug Fruit Barrels as a kid, high fructose corn syrup painting my lips.
2. A Prayer
My mother is a blue apron pacing in the kitchen. My mother is speaking in prayer for my undocumented uncle. She hangs our clothes on a clothesline. She washes a plate.

I hear her whisper, بدون أوراق, which means without papers , to my father when talking about my uncle.

The first time I meet him, he's just arrived from Amman, Jordan to our home in Barberton, Ohio. He's sitting in our living room in the middle of our beige couch. He's loud and he talks really fast and his arms flail in the air and he makes a lot of jokes. His legs bounce and he has a nervous habit of brushing his nose with his index finger when he talks. He is unlike my mother, who has a quiet presence and lightly moves through our home.

I think I'm about four years old when I meet my uncle. Each Friday, he brings me a huge bag of candy which I dive my scrawny hands into. He works at a gas station. He makes my mother laugh. He reminds her of home.

He will be بدون أوراق for a long, long time. It will feel like forever. Until it doesn't.
3. A Question
A child asks

"If Aliens invaded Earth, wouldn't we seem Alien to them?"

According to the U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), in the U.S, you are an Alien if you are not a U.S citizen. If you hold a green card (permanent resident card) you are considered a "resident" Alien.

Alien (adjective)

1. a :belonging or relating to another person, place, or thing : STRANGE
                 //an alien environment b :relating, belonging, or owing allegiance to another country or government : FOREIGN //alien residents c : EXOTIC //alien plants d : coming from another world : EXTRATERRISTRIAL //alien being // analien spaceship Alien (noun) 1. a : a person of another family, race, or nation //aliens seeking asylum in the U.S. b : a foreign-born resident who has not been naturalized and is still a subject or citizen of foreign country.

//Alien//Alone//(UN)natural(IZED)// Foreign//FOR//Natural//Native//Nurture//Nations//

My grandmother was ALIEN. My father was ALIEN. My mother was ALIEN. I was ALIEN. My siblings were ALIEN. The whole goddamn fucking nation (read: world) is ALIEN.

My God. We are all

So green. Have you looked

at the grass ?
4. USCIS. Trip #1 - A Simple Act of Revision
At the USCIS office in Cleveland, Ohio, my grandmother and I move through security. We are here to get her fingerprint scanned so she can become a U.S Citizen. For the last five years, my grandmother has held a green card. She's lived with my parents during her time here, and travels back and forth from Amman, Jordan, to the U.S.

Over the last year, we've finished her USCIS Form N-400 and sent it in, along with the $725 fee.

After moving through security, we ride the elevator up to the fifth floor. The federal building is cold and stale. I gaze at my grandmother, draped in her black abaya and clutching her purse, light brown eyes waiting for the doors to open.

A white woman greets us at the door, then gives us a form to fill out. She slides it under the glass screen.

When asked her country of origin, my grandmother writes PALESTINE in black pen and slides it back to the woman.

The white woman says WE DO NOT RECOGNIZE

PALESTINE AS A COUNTRY

And crosses out PALESTINE with a red pen.

as an entire people
5. A Quick Study of the Word Existence
are silenced

Inger Christensen says, "Apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist."
6. A Place
comes from the Latin existere/exsister, "to step out, stand forth, emerge, appear."

I exist. Palestine exists. Undocumented immigrants exist. Muslims exist.

There are about 50 mailboxes in Section 8 housing in Barberton, where we lived when I was younger. The mailboxes are in the middle of the large roundabout in front of our home. Behind the mailboxes is an enclosed bulletin board for announcements and flyers.
7. USCIS. Trip #2 - A Violation
No one ever used the bulletin board. Or, I never paid attention. It's the bees I was usually fixated on. They were trapped behind the sliding glass doors. So many of them were dead. Bee corpses everywhere. A few flew around, hitting the glass doors again and again.

I watched them all the time. I didn't care about helping them escape. When I'd get bored, which was often, I liked tapping on the glass and shaking the foundation of the board and watching the bees fly in circles and panic. I don't know how they got in, but I knew they couldn't leave. Sometimes, if I pressed my ear to the glass, I could hear them buzzing, drones.

At security, I stand in front of my grandmother. We are here so she can be interviewed by an immigration officer. But first, we have to move through police scanners and metal detectors.

TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES
MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR ID ON HAND
NO BELTS, PHONES, JACKETS

I wonder why the officers are always yelling. One of the officers, of course, wants to check my hair, has flagged me for "additional screening." I have to stand with my hands up as he waves a scanner around my body.

When I turn around, my grandmother is not wearing her headscarf. I'm not accustomed to seeing her golden-brown hair in public. I give her a questioning look as she waits for her black headscarf to move through the security monitor.

When I ask her what happened, she won't look at me and keeps whispering, ", شلحونئ, شلحونئ" - they stripped me, they stripped me. She looks naked and vulnerable as she hurries the scarf around her head. Later, she tells me an officer demanded she take it off, twice.

I want my rage to elicit love and more love. I want people to stop asking if I love this country. No. Ask if it loves me.

On the way home that day, it is autumn and the leaves are beautiful and dying. My grandmother loves this country, its greenery. Used to the desert landscape of Amman, Jordan, this is one of the few times in her life when she's been able to witness autumn in Ohio. She watches the trees from the passenger window.

I am shaking my head. At nothing. At everything.
Her eyes are grateful.
I want her to want more from America.
8. A Dream
The words pound in my head again and again as I hold onto my steering wheel. My anger is a sound I turn down like a bad song no one wants to listen to.

She asks me to look at the trees. I tell her I am looking.

My mom, standing at the door of our house in Barberton, wearing a bleach-stained T-Shirt, her curly hair swaying in the sunlight, calling my name to come home.

Dad calling me an old lady for drinking the leftover sweet black tea each morning. His laughter, an echo. His head cradled back. Eyes full.

Making mud soup with my friend, Shawnee, her scrawny body leaning over a plastic bowl, her hand holding a stick as she swirls it through the mud.

Lying next to my dad as I fell asleep, the sound of Al Jazeera booming through the living room, my hair smelling like cool watermelon Loreal Kids Shampoo.

This is what I remember most about Barberton. I'm about 13 years old when we move to our house in Akron. After we leave, I tell my brother I miss our home in Barberton. He says, "We lived in the fucking projects," as if it's something to be ashamed of.

When we buy our house in Akron, it's not the home of my parents' American Dream. For one, it's foreclosed. It's also Akron, which is not Fairlawn or Medina, the richer neighboring counties of my mother's wishes.

The house is a wreck. The bathrooms need updating. The kitchen needs updating. The windows have to be replaced. The hardwood floors have to be refinished. The grass needs to be cut. The walls need painting.

A white picket fence needs building. It's missing a two-car garage. And a white family. And an SUV. And two kids with blonde hair and blue eyes.
9. USCIS. Trip #3 - A Test
My mom makes her opinion of the house very clear. To this day, she calls it a خرابا, "a desolation." For years after, if I look at her closely enough, I can feel something's broken within her.

I try not to look.

My grandma has to memorize the questions and answers for the USCIS civics test. She doesn't speak much English, but her reading skills are decent. For months, she carries her study booklet everywhere she goes, and alternates between studying the questions and reading the Quran.

At USCIS, the officer will ask her 10 random questions out of a selection of 100. She has to answer at least six correctly.

Questions like, "What is the "rule of law?" and "What happened at the Constitutional Convention?"

I test her every week for two months, and every day when we get closer to the date. She gets hung up on certain words and has trouble pronouncing them. The words are Legislature, Communism, Terrorist , and . The night before her test, I repeat them to her:

legislaturecommunismterroristspangled

and she repeats them back

legislaturecommunismterroristspangled

and while sitting in the waiting room of USCIS
10. A Letter
legislaturecommunismterroristspangled

and on and on and on

It's fourth grade. Dustin has orange hair, plays baseball, and cuts in front of me at the drinking fountain line.

When I protest, he turns around and says, "Go back to your country," takes a drink of water, then walks away.

Before this moment, it doesn't occur to me that my country is not my country, that I should "go back."

Go back to where, exactly? Am I alien. Am I not like the others. Am I other. Am I.

My family came to the U.S. when I was two years old. We'd gone back to Amman, Jordan once: when I was in third grade, for the summer. Amman was always a vacation spot, a place where mom smiled more and where I spent time with family members who listened to me speak English and talk about America in envy.

A place where I was seen as American and not like the others.
11. A Chaos of Semantics
When my teachers learn about what happened between Dustin and me, they force him to write me a letter of apology. His letter, placed on my desk at the end of the day, is written in pencil. Within it, Dustin writes something along the lines of, "I'm sorry for what I said I don't know what your family had to go through to get here."

I'm sorry for what I said I don't know what your family had to go through to get here.

I'm sorry                          I don't know          your family                                           here.

I'm sorry

Semantic Satiation: A psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to lose meaning, temporarily. Or, according to Urban Dictionary, it's when "you say a word so much it starts to sound fucking weird."

Leon James, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, coined the term and describes the process as a kind of mental "fatigue."
Air. Ee. Can. Ummm.
We Too Are American We Too Are American We Too Are American We Too Are American
We Too Are American We Too Are American We Too Are American We Too Are American

When I say this phrase, the words and push out of my mouth, like a whistle. And then my lips stick together to produce the in American, before the quick movements of my tongue make .

When I repeat this to myself in front of a mirror, my body disappears.

If I keep going

I start wondering if this act will render my family into existence.

I want to believe language matters, that words create meaning, that a person can breathe
a thing into existence.

But what happens when the repetition of the words

beckon at the opposite?
12. A Home
I've gone on for too long.

What I am talking about is loneliness.

The breakfast table is my family's connection to Palestine, to home, to Jordan. In this way, eating is sacred - and dipping pita bread into olive oil is an act of love.

Saturday mornings, you'll find pita bread atop the stove, my mother flipping it while waiting for it to warm.
13. USCIS. Take 4 - A Photo
The homeland is stuck in our teeth. It's filling out cavities. It rests on our tongue.

My God.
How we yearn for its olive trees.

My grandmother's body in perfect posture, sitting across the immigration officer at USCIS. A plaque on the wall in his office, a certificate of achievement for his time serving as a border control agent.

Six years.

The same amount of time it's taken my grandmother to get to this point.
He asks her six questions. I have the answers memorized. Their exact phrasing. The placement of their commas, their punctuation.

I sit in perfect posture, suspended. Waiting. For her to answer each question.
When he tells my grandmother she's passed her civics test, she cries. I cry.

Outside, my grandmother wants to take a photo next to the large statue of George Washington. She has her hands up, swaying in the wind. A smile sprawled on her face. She allows herself a moment of silliness. Child-like glee.

She tells me, this is George Washington.
14. Confessions - Take 2
I know, grandma, I say. I know.

I take the photo.

I am tired of language. I don't want to make metaphors. About olive trees. About wearing a keffiyeh. About About About. The dream has not ended. My grandma is back in Jordan. She loves her passport. What does it mean to love. A country. A book. A people. To say "I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty" while thinking about Palestine. While holding the key to your father's first home. While While While. The news keeps screaming. The headlines chew at our eyes. A bald eagle burdens its wings with suitcases. It drops them in another land.

Note: Pieces and parts of this essay are in conversation with Marwa Helal's Invasive Species.

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Issue Thirty: Noor Hindi | The Adroit Journal - The Adroit Journal

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Back to Issue Thirty BY NOOR HINDI " An immigrant is just a person who knows home is a verb," - Philip Metres 1. Confessions We did not watch Baseball. My siblings learned English by watching . As a child, I learned how to dip pita bread into hummus, zait & za'atar, labneh, baba ghanoush.

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I wrote this while teaching argument this semester and have submitted it to our local paper. In the webinar you saw where I started--and heard how the focus of my essay shifted with feedback. 

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I wrote this while teaching argument this semester and have submitted it to our local paper. In the webinar you saw where I started--and heard how the focus of my essay shifted with feedback. 

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I found this essay when looking for a mentor text that blends narrative writing with more traditional literary analysis.  My Google search turned this post on Movingwriters.org. The Moving Writers link also provides a portion of a student sample.

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What Writers Can Learn From ‘Goodnight Moon’

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The children’s book sets up a world and then subverts its own rules even as it follows them.

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What’s one more deadly school shooting when the real danger to kids is a book?

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What’s one more deadly school shooting when the real danger to kids is a book?

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Once again, carnage goes to school. Once again, American students are used for target practice. But conservative leaders are on the case. Recognizing the ongoing threat to our children, they know it's time for decisive action.

It's time to do something about books.

And if you expected that sentence to end differently, you haven't been paying attention. In red America these days, books are Public Enemy No. 1.

As Time magazine recently reported, librarians are seeing a definite spike in censorship activity. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, executive director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, called it "an unprecedented volume of challenges." From Texas to South Carolina, to Virginia to Florida and beyond, conservative governors and advocacy groups are removing books from school library shelves, particularly those that deal with the two subjects they find most threatening: sexuality and race.

All to protect our children.

You may say that makes no sense. You may look at what happened last week at a high school in Oxford, Michigan - four students killed, six more and a teacher wounded - and say that what we need to protect our children from is the fact that any troubled classmate can too easily obtain a weapon of mass destruction with which to work through his teenage angst. But on that subject, those same governors and advocacy groups will give you only loud silence.

In their world, a mass shooting is just a natural phenomenon, unpleasant, but unavoidable, like rain. Would you try to ban clouds?

No, from where they sit, the gravest threat facing our children stems not from bullets but from books, and they won't rest until the scourge of knowledge has been defeated. Which is to logic what a funhouse mirror is to one's actual appearance: a reality hopelessly distorted.

We live in a world where students huddle under their desks in active-shooter drills, but conservatives are concerned that learning about race might make them uncomfortable. A world where children have PTSD from seeing friends slaughtered, but conservatives fear that reading about sex might expose them to things they're not yet ready for. A world where kids go to school with bulletproof backpacks, but conservatives think books have gotten way out of hand.

Consider the picture Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie tweeted last week, the one of him and his family posed before a Christmas tree with gleaming plastic smiles, all cradling long guns. Massie's tweet read, "Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo." To be conservative is to believe that's not at all creepy and fetishistic, nor indicative of insecurities and overcompensation, nor even mildly suggestive of an unhealthy phallic fixation. To be conservative is to feel it's a completely appropriate thing to post, just days after the deadliest school shooting since 2018, to celebrate the birth of a man called the Prince of Peace.

To be conservative is to see that picture and remain convinced that America's problem is too many books.

Never mind that no book ever pierced flesh and broke bone, no book ever spilled blood, no book ever left an empty place at a dinner table. And never mind that in America, too many kids find it easier to lay hands on a Glock than a copy of "Beloved." Tragically, some of us are just fine with that.

After all, you've got to have your priorities straight. You've got to protect what matters to you most.

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What's one more deadly school shooting when the real danger to kids is a book? | Opinion

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Once again, carnage goes to school. Once again, American students are used for target practice. But conservative leaders are on the case. Recognizing the ongoing threat to our children, they know it's time for decisive action. It's time to do something about books. And if you expected that sentence to end differently, you haven't been paying attention.

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A lot of great personal essays at This I believe. This one makes for a great mentor text.

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https://thisibelieve.org/wp-content/media/audio/TIB_joshua_yuchasz_14338.mp3

What if everyone in the world was exactly alike? What if everyone talked the same, acted the same, listened to the same music, and watched the same T.V. programs?

The world would be extremely dull! I believe it's important to accept people for who they are.

Differences are important and they should be respected. For example, many important people throughout history were considered different, such as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Harriet Tubman, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Abraham Lincoln. They did great things, but some people thought they were weird, because they had strong feelings about something. I can relate to these people, because I've been in that situation before, many times.

It all started in elementary school when I realized that I wasn't like everyone else. My mom says that I have a tendency of obsessing on certain subjects. Unfortunately, these subjects don't interest other kids my age and they really don't interest my teachers. In fact, my kindergarten teacher said she would scream if I mentioned snakes or lizards one more time, while she was teaching the days of the week. I would get in trouble for not paying attention, and the teasing began.

In third grade, my teacher informed me that I have Asperger's Syndrome, and I said, "So what? Do you know that Godzilla's suit weighs 188 lbs.?:

Later, I asked my mom, "What is Asperger's Syndrome? Am I gonna die?" She said that it's like having blinders on, and that I can only see one thing at a time, and that it's hard to focus on other things. Like, I would tell anyone and everyone that would listen about Godzilla, because my big obsession was, and still is, Godzilla - not a real popular subject with the middle school crowd, and so the teasing continues.

I might be different, because I have different interests than other teenagers, but that doesn't give them the right to be so mean and cruel to me. Kids at Oak Valley make fun of me for liking what I like the most.

People also make fun of me for knowing facts about volcanoes, whales, tornadoes, and many other scientific things. My mom says that she has been able to answer many questions on Jeopardy just by listening to what I have to say, but I've even been ridiculed for being smart.

Maybe someday, I'll become a gene engineer and create the real Godzilla. I can dream, can't I?

Sometimes I wish I were like everyone else...but not really. Because I believe people should be respected for being different. Because we're all different in our own ways.

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By all outward appearances, Joshua Yuchasz is a regular teenager. But his classmates still tease him about the thing that makes him different. Yuchasz believes it’s our differences that deserve respect.

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In 2019, when I was mayor of Stockton, California, I launched the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, the first major guaranteed income program in any American city. The pilot provided 125 randomly selected residents with $500 per month for two years - no strings attached and no work requirements. To be eligible, an individual only had to be at least 18 years old, reside in Stockton and live in a neighborhood with a median income at or below the city's then-median household income of $46,033.

I was motivated to try something radically different because the status quo was unacceptable to me: Stockton's median household income was far lower than the state median of about $62,000; we were also among the worst in the nation when it came to child poverty.

The racial wealth gap didn't happen by accident.

The findings of our pilot were significant: Compared to the control group, the people receiving the benefit experienced significantly less income volatility, so they were able to plan, pay for unexpected expenses and pay down debt. They were also healthier, exhibited less depression and anxiety and reported enhanced well-being. Recipients spent the money on essentials like food, utilities and transportation. And full-time employment increased dramatically for residents who were part of the pilot program (from 28 percent to 40 percent) as folks were able to stop working multiple jobs and take some time to find a single, betterjob.

Many of these findings fly in the face of stereotypes that this nation has maintained for generations about people who are struggling, and particularly about people of color. However, for me, someone who grew up in poverty, the findings were not all that surprising. I've long known talent and intellect are universal, but resources and opportunities are not.

Indeed the results of giving people more resources were so positive that now more than 60 mayors across the country have committed to guaranteed income as a tool to abolish poverty, with about half already running pilots in their own cities.

We absolutely can implement bold policies on the local, state and federal levels that will dramatically change the trajectory of people's lives, eliminate poverty and improve the nation's productivity. But we can only achieve that kind of change if we disrupt and replace the current narrative on poverty based on racist, classist, sexist and xenophobic stereotypes. It's a narrative that blames people for their struggles - labeling them as lazy, corrupt, unintelligent or worse - and deems them undeserving of our trust, our investment or even their own dignity.

This framing allows politicians to ignore and maintain blatantly unjust systems that keep people trapped in poverty - like jobs that pay unlivable wages or students at poor schools not having adequate, if any, access to resources like guidance counselors and extracurricular activities that affluent schools provide.

We absolutely can implement bold policies on the local, state and federal levels that will dramatically change the trajectory of people's lives.

By viewing poor people as less than wealthier people - or even as disposable - actions like treating their communities as America's dumping ground for hazardous waste and pollution will continue, all while leaving them barren of health care infrastructure.

A narrative that blames people for not rising out of poverty also permits policymakers to look the other way as so many young people are denied access or priced out of continuing education, even when we know higher education is necessary (though not a silver bullet) for advancing in today's economy. It's a narrative that contributes to continual mass incarceration that breaks up families and strips talent and potential from Black and brown communities.

But what would happen if we were to replace this false and destructive narrative with an authentic one that centers the experiences of people who actually live in poverty? These are people like my mother, grandmother and aunt - my "three moms," as I refer to them in my memoir "The Deeper the Roots"- who together raised me while my father served a sentence of 25 years to life due to a draconian "Three strikes, you're out" law. A fundamental shift in how communities like the one I grew up in are talked about would recognize the strengths, assets and dignity of individuals and families. It would look squarely at how people are set up for failure through under-resourced schools, low pay with no benefits, over policing and much more, and it would therefore create space for new policies that would, as I call it, upset the setup.

The stakes for a new narrative, new politics and new policy around poverty couldn't be higher. That's why I launched that seemingly radical policy pilot in Stockton and why lawmakers from both parties in cities across the U.S. are now following suit.

A fundamental shift in how communities like the one I grew up in are talked about would recognize the strengths, assets and dignity of individuals and families.

With approximately 37 million people in the U.S. living below the official poverty line ($26,496 for a family of four) - a woefully inadequate measure that doesn't account for the true cost of living - we are at a pivotal moment when we will make significant progress or retreat in the face of backlash. Government assistance in response to the pandemic kept 53 million people above the poverty line in 2020, according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of Census Bureau data. Stimulus checks (cash), expanded help with food, emergency rental assistance and extended unemployment insurance all played important roles and, in many cases, literally provided people with a lifeline. And since the child tax credit was expanded in July, 3 million children have been kept out of poverty each month, according to estimations from Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy.

Yet we already see the backlash. As the Biden administration and most Democrats work to make the child tax credit permanent through the Build Back Better Act, others are urging to include work requirements and questioning whether parents are deserving of this benefit without some kind of extra effort.

There is no harder work than raising children in poverty. Nothing demands greater effort: from advocating in schools to cobbling together transportation, child care and other essentials; dealing with dangerous health impacts from the environment; trying to keep your kids safe from state and neighborhood violence; juggling bills and multiple jobs in the formal or informal economy; and navigating byzantine bureaucracies to get a little help.

Moreover, we've seen that hard work doesn't necessarily guarantee anything but more hard work. You can do everything right and still not receive the promised payoff. The proverb "If you work hard and play by the rules, anyone can make it" just isn't true.

What is true is that a little assistance can go a long way - and we've known that for a long time. So it is past time to end paternalistic and stigmatizing policy and instead pursue bold solutions that are morally just and economically smart.

In addition to giving people cash, other bold policies include creating baby bonds so everyone has access to capital to pursue education, entrepreneurship or home ownership when they reach adulthood. The racial wealth gap didn't happen by accident: Among the contributing factors were Black and brown people being excluded from Social Security and New Deal labor protections, barred from GI benefits, denied mortgages through redlining, targeted by job and pay discrimination and blocked from accessing capital to create, sustain or expand small businesses.

We also need to create good jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits - and if you visit any poor community in the country, that's one of the first things they will say they want (the other likely being more resources for their schools). If the private sector can't do it, then the government should provide a job. Call it a job guarantee or a Green New Deal (the climate change proposal includes a federal jobs guarantee) - call it whatever you want - but there is needed work to be done in many fields like elder and child care; public transit and infrastructure; building, rehabilitating and retrofitting affordable, energy-efficient housing; creating parks and green space; and more.

Finally, we will never eliminate poverty unless we create a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people already here - the vast majority of whom are already contributing to our economy and communities every day. Citizenship is one of the clearest routes out of poverty. Compared to work authorization programs like Temporary Protected Status, it offers greater protection against exploitation by employers, ends the fear of deportation (as well as its abuse for political gain) and allows individuals and families access to support when they need it. Remember how undocumented immigrants - many of whom pay taxes and were front-line essential workers during the height of the pandemic - were deemed ineligible for stimulus checks?

How will we pay for these and other new policies? We can start by demanding - as most Americans do - that wealthy corporations and people finally pay their fair share in taxes. We can also revamp an upside-down tax code that largely rewards the already wealthy, drives economic inequality and widens racial inequities, according to Prosperity Now.

When I was a child, my mother used to say to me, "Don't tell nobody our business." That was based in part on a sense of shame that she and many others absorbed just for having to struggle. Since then, I've learned that telling the truth in fact sets us free. It did for me in my life, it has in fits and starts for our nation and it can again if we resolve to identify and dismantle the systems that create, sustain and perpetuate poverty.

It all begins with telling a new and authentic story.

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Opinion | To end poverty in America, we need to start telling the truth about poor people

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The racist and classist way poor people are talked about in the U.S. is part of the reason why failed policies stay in place. The narrative around poverty needs a radical shift.

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https://826digital.com/writing/bigger-than-you-think/
Student Essay from a source that has sparks and lessons and examples

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We'd love to hear from you! Let us know how 826 Digital is working for you and your students. We welcome your questions or feedback.

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Save the Snow Day: Save Teenage Education (Published 2021)

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We are honoring each of the Top 10 winners of our Student Editorial Contest by publishing their essays. This one is by Sheerea Yu, age 15.

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I love using these essay from the NY Times Personal Narrative Essay contest. I've used them in all sorts of ways, too. They even have essay narrated by the writers where they talk about how and why they incorporated certain strategies. Generated some great discussions in my class.

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The Winners of Our Personal Narrative Essay Contest (Published 2020)

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We asked students to write about a meaningful life experience. Here are the eight winning essays, as well as runners-up and honorable mentions.

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From The Anthropocene Reviewed - Orbital Sunrise 

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From The Anthropocene Reviewed - Orbital Sunrise 

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Any of the essays in John Greene's The Anthropocene Reviewed are great. The Podcast is great as well.

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‎The Anthropocene Reviewed: Orbital Sunrise on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show The Anthropocene Reviewed, Ep Orbital Sunrise - Aug 26, 2021

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I walked through the bushes and trees. Along beside the rice paddies. I walked among the green.

A once daily scene from a different past, an old friend.

Four months after the virus began disrupting, then ravaging humanity's routine, my first glimpse of freedom proper. Four months mostly confined to my condo. A sense of normal returned, then snapped away by the latest scare, as living, breathing nodes spread...

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I walked through the bushes and trees. Along beside the rice paddies. I walked among the green. A once daily scene from a different past, an old friend. Four months after the virus began disrupting, then ravaging humanity's routine, my first glimpse of freedom proper. Four months mostly confined to my condo.

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Why Can't a Smart Woman Love Fashion? by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Why Can't a Smart Woman Love Fashion? by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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I love this collection of short essays so much!

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I love this collection of short essays so much!

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https://brenebrown.com/articles/2018/05/24/the-midlife-unraveling/

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In my late thirties, my intuition had tried to warn me about the possibility of a midlife struggle. I experienced internal rumblings about the meaning and purpose of my life. I was incredibly busy proving myself in all of my different roles (mother, professor, researcher, writer, friend, sister, daughter, wife), so much so that it was difficult for any emotion other than fear to grab my attention. However, I do remember flashes of wondering if I'd always be too afraid to let myself be truly seen and known.

But intuition is a heart thing, and until recently I had steamrolled over most of my heart's caution signs with intellectualizing. In my head, I had always responded to the idea of "midlife angst" by scoffing and coming up with some politically and therapeutically correct way of saying that midlife whining is pathetic. The entire concept of the midlife crisis is bullshit. If you're struggling at midlife, it's because you haven't suffered or sacrificed enough. Quit pissing and moaning, work harder, and suck it up.

As it turns out, I was right about one thing-to call what happens at midlife "a crisis" is bullshit. A crisis is an intense, short-lived, acute, easily identifiable, and defining event that can be controlled and managed.

Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.

By definition, you can't control or manage an unraveling. You can't cure the midlife unraveling with control any more than the acquisitions, accomplishments, and alpha-parenting of our thirties cured our deep longing for permission to slow down and be imperfect.

Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:

I'm not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing-these coping mechanisms that you've developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt-has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you're still searching and you're more lost than ever. Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can't live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through your veins. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It's time to show up and be seen.

If you look at each midlife "event" as a random, stand-alone struggle, you might be lured into believing you're only up against a small constellation of "crises." The truth is that the midlife unraveling is a series of painful nudges strung together by low-grade anxiety and depression, quiet desperation, and an insidious loss of control. By low-grade, quiet, and insidious, I mean it's enough to make you crazy, but seldom enough for people on the outside to validate the struggle or offer you help and respite. It's the dangerous kind of suffering-the kind that allows you to pretend that everything is OK.

We go to work and unload the dishwasher and love our families and get our hair cut. Everything looks pretty normal on the outside. But on the inside we're barely holding it together. We want to reach out, but judgment (the currency of the midlife realm) holds us back. It's a terrible case of cognitive dissonance-the psychologically painful process of trying to hold two competing truths in a mind that was engineered to constantly reduce conflict and minimize dissension (e.g., I'm falling apart and need to slow down and ask for help. Only needy, flaky, unstable people fall apart and ask for help).

It's human nature and brain biology to do whatever it takes to resolve cognitive dissonance-lie, cheat, rationalize, justify, ignore. For most of us, this is where our expertise in managing perception bites us on the ass. We are torn between desperately wanting everyone to see our struggle so that we can stop pretending and desperately doing whatever it takes to make sure no one ever sees anything except what we've edited and approved for posting.

What bubbles up from this internal turmoil is fantasy. We might glance over at a cheap motel while we're driving down the highway and think, I'll just check in and stay there until they come looking for me. Then they'll know I'm losing my mind. Or maybe we're standing in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher when we suddenly find ourselves holding up a glass and wondering, Would my family take this struggle more seriously if I just started hurling all this shit through the window?

Most of us opt out of these choices. We'd have to arrange to let the dog out and have the kids picked up before we checked into the lonely roadside motel. We'd spend hours cleaning up glass and apologizing for our "bad choices" to our temper tantrum-prone toddlers. It just wouldn't be worth it, so most of us just push through until "losing it" is no longer a voluntary fantasy.

Midlife or Midlove

Many scholars have proposed that the struggle at midlife is about the fear that comes with our first true glimpse of mortality. Again, wishful thinking. Midlife is not about the fear of death. Midlife is death. Tearing down the walls that we spent our entire life building is death. Like it or not, at some point during midlife, you're going down, and after that there are only two choices: staying down or enduring rebirth.

It's a painful irony that the very things that may have kept us safe growing up ultimately get in the way of our becoming the parents, partners, and/or people we want to be.

Maybe, like me, you are the perfect pleaser and performer, and now all of that perfection and rule-following is suffocating. Or maybe you work hard to keep people at a safe distance and now the distance has turned into intolerable loneliness. There are also the folks who grew up taking care of everyone else because they had no choice. Their death is having to let go of the caretaking, and their rebirth is learning how to take care of themselves (and work through the pushback that always comes with setting new boundaries).

Whatever the issue, it seems as if we spend the first half of our lives shutting down feelings to stop the hurt and the second half trying to open everything back up to heal the hurt.

Sometimes when the "tear the walls down and submit to death" thing overwhelms me, I find it easier to think about midlife as midlove. After two decades of research on shame, authenticity, and belonging, I'm convinced that loving ourselves is the most difficult and courageous thing we'll ever do. Maybe we've been given a finite amount of time to find that self-love, and midlife is the halfway mark. It's time to let go of the shame and fear and embrace love. Time to fish or cut bait.

I don't think midlife/midlove is on a schedule. I was forty-one when it hit, but I have friends and I've interviewed people who found themselves smack-dab in the middle of the unraveling as early as their mid-thirties and as late as their fifties. The only firm timing for midlife/midlove is that it ends only when we physically die. This is not something you can treat then dismiss. The search for self-love and acceptance is like most of the new ailments that hit at midlife-it's a chronic condition. It may start in midlife, but we have to deal with it for the rest of our lives.

And just in case you think you can blow off the universe the way you did when you were in your twenties and she whispered, "Pay attention," or when you were in your early thirties and she whispered, "Slow down," I assure you that she's much more dogged in midlife. When I tried to ignore her, she made herself very clear: "There are consequences for squandering your gifts. There are penalties for leaving big pieces of your life unlived. You're halfway to dead. Get a move on."

Once the shock of the universe's visits wears off-and you get over thinking, Oh my God! I'd prefer a crisis! -there are several ways to respond:

I hear tell that there are actually people who pull the universe closer, embrace her wisdom, thank her for the opportunity to grow, and calmly walk into the unraveling. I try to spend limited time with these people, so I can't tell you much about how this works.

Another option is to deny that any of this ever happened. Of course, denial is not so easy at this level-it is the universe that we're talking about here. Pretending that midlife is not happening requires active denial, like putting your fingers in your ears and singing, "La-la-la-la-la." As sweet and childlike as that may sound, these folks are normally not so sweet and childlike.

After the ear-plugging and humming, the only way to maintain your denial of the midlife unraveling is to become even more perfect, more certain, and more judgmental. For these folks, allowing just one ounce of uncertainty or doubt or questioning to bubble up could cause rapid, involuntary unraveling. They can't be wrong-their lives could spin out of control. They march through life, teeth and butt cheeks clenched, without flinching and, often, without feeling.

There's also the numbing option. If there's one thing that we've mastered by midlife, it's how to take the edge off of feeling pain and discomfort. We are so good at numbing-eating, drinking, spending, planning, playing online, perfecting, staying really, really busy. If every midlifer who "only drinks a good glass of wine with dinner" stopped drinking, there wouldn't be a vineyard left in business. Unfortunately, what makes midlife different from the other stages that we've managed to survive is that the symptoms don't improve over time. Choosing to numb the midlife unraveling is choosing to numb for the rest of your life.

Last, there's the "no-holds-barred" resistance response. I liken it to existential cage fighting. You and the universe go into the ring and only one person comes out. This, of course, was my option.

When the universe came to me, I listened. And when she was done whispering, I pulled back, looked into her eyes, and spit in her face.

How dare she ask anything of me! I had worked and sacrificed and paid enough. I had spent my life saying "yes" when I wanted to scream, "Hell no! Do it yourself!" I had met every deadline, expectation, and request possible. I had earned every bit of my armor, and I was enraged by the idea of giving it up.

I expected her to walk away like the dejected mother of an angry teenager, but she simply stood in front of me, wiping the spit off her cheek.

We stared at each other for a minute, then I said, "I'm not afraid of you. I know what you're asking and the answer is no. I've spent my entire life building these walls and digging these moats. Do you really think a little whisper is going to intimidate me? Do I strike you as the unraveling type?"

I'm not ornery or rebellious by nature; it's just that I spent thirty years trying to outrun and outsmart vulnerability and uncertainty. The fact that the almighty universe had descended and asked me to turn myself over to her custody didn't mean a damn thing to me. I'm not the surrendering type.

She was quiet.

I didn't back down. I was my own little emotional militia. I put on my most serious game face and said, "I know what you're trying to do and it's not going to work. I'm prepared. I've spent a decade researching and writing on shame and vulnerability and all of the hard shit that you throw around to scare people. I'm ready."

She looked back at me with loving eyes, then said, "I'm sorry it has to be this way, but clearly this is how you want to do it. You leave me no choice."

Her calmness was unsettling. I was afraid. She wasn't backing down. So in this moment of sheer terror, I did the only thing I knew how to do when confronted with fear-I bullied her. I gave her a small shove and said, "Then bring it!"

Her loving eyes didn't change one bit. She just looked at me and said, "I will."

When the Universe Brings It

I put up the fight of my life, but I was totally outmatched. The universe knew exactly how to use vulnerability and uncertainty to bring down this perfectionistic shame researcher: a huge, unexpected wallop of professional failure, one devastating and public humiliation after the next, a showdown with God, strained connections with my family, anxiety so severe that I started having dizzy spells, depression, fear, and the thing that pissed me off the most-grace. No matter how hard or far I fell, grace was there to pick me up, dust me off, and shove me back in for some more.

It was an ugly street fight, and even though I got my ass kicked, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. There was a significant amount of pain and loss, but something amazing happened along the way-I discovered me. The real me. The messy, imperfect, brave, scared, creative, loving, compassionate, wholehearted me.

Maya Angelou writes, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." I've always honored the power of story. In fact, I believe so strongly in its power that I've dedicated my career to excavating untold stories and bringing them up to the light. In some miraculous way, I feel as if this midlife unraveling has taught me-in my head and my heart-how to be brave. I'm still not good at surrendering or "living in the question," but I am getting better. I guess you could say I've graduated to "writhing in the question." Not exactly Zen, but it is progress.

As far as my relationship with the universe . . . well, we've actually become very good friends. I even came to love and trust her when, in a quiet moment, I looked deeply into her eyes and realized that she, the universe, was me.

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Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling. By definition, you can't control or manage an unraveling. You can't cure the midlife unraveling with control any more than the acquisitions, accomplishments, and alpha-parenting of our thirties cured our deep longing for permission to slow down and be imperfect...

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I use this persuasive essay after we read the book SPEAK, but also to introduce persuasive writing and show them an example of putting story into our persuasive essays to make them better! 

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I use this persuasive essay after we read the book SPEAK, but also to introduce persuasive writing and show them an example of putting story into our persuasive essays to make them better! 

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https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52eec360e4b0c81c80749630/t/5c4e5cd06d2a73c5a053a3a4/1548639440588/AoW+1819_21+Sexual+Assault.pdf

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The winners of a multi-genre writing challenge...what's it like to be a teenager now?

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The winners of a multi-genre writing challenge...what's it like to be a teenager now?

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What It’s Like to Be a Teenager Now: The Winners of Our Coming of Age in 2021 Contest (Published 2022)

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25 videos, comics, poems, paintings, photos, songs, games and GIFs tell a powerful story.

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Personal Essay that was featured in Elle Magazine

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You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument by Caroline Randall Williams

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You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument by Caroline Randall Williams

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Opinion | You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument (Published 2020)

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The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

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Pre-order on IndieBound.

Pre-order on Amazon.

Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

ONE OF THE FALL'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS: Time, Entertainment Weekly, O, Oprah Magazine, Boston Globe, Seattle Times, BuzzFeed, Newsweek, Bustle, Woman's Day, Nylon, BookPage, The Millions, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Lit Hub, AV Club, Goop, Book Riot, Pacific Standard, The Week, and Romper.

"Jamison has emerged as a giant in the world of creative nonfiction. She returns with a beautifully compiled collection of essays reflecting on obsession and longing."- Entertainment Weekly

"This wide-ranging essay collection is insightful and searching, exciting and staggering. Jamison interweaves memoir, journalism, and cultural criticism into essays that explore topics like motherhood, romance, and relationships... Jamison has been compared to such greats as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, so if you enjoy those, you'll love this one."- Good Housekeeping

"In her new essay collection, Jamison allows herself to roam beyond the boundaries of one issue, and instead latches her powerful, precise observations to a number of unconventional topics."-Cristina Arreola, Bustle

"These perceptive essays demonstrate that the best-selling author of The Empathy Exams continues to explore the limits of human connections." --- Elle

"To fortify and enlarge the world through eloquence--apt descriptions of Jamison's new collection...Another wonderful book from this gifted writer." --- The Millions

"Leslie Jamison's astonishingly formidable, restless intellect has gifted us two monumental works of nonfiction: 2014's The Empathy Exams, and last year's The Recovering. Here, she turns her exacting eye on subjects such as the loneliest whale in the world and a Croatian museum filled with the effluvia of failed relationships."- O, The Oprah Magazine

"If you ever need to be reminded of the potential of the essay and why essay collections matter or if you just want to get excited about one, read Leslie Jamison...In Make It Scream, Make it Burn, three of the most poignant and personal essays come in the final section: one on Jamison's own marriage...A brilliant exploration of what it means to be a stepmother...and the last, an essay on giving birth that flips back and forth between Jamison's pregnancy and an eating disorder that marked her earlier experiences of her body."- Goop

"Illuminating and ruminative...Jamison is positively brilliant when penetrating a subject and unraveling its layers of meaning...Fans of the author's unique brand of perceptiveness will be delighted."

--- Publishers Weekly

"A whirlwind exploration of longing and obsession... How could you not be intrigued?"- Marie Claire

"Richly diverse...The pieces in Make It Scream, Make It Burn are all written with care and intricacy, drawing readers in and making us care...Jamison's observational skills, genuine empathy, and lack of sentimentality create an intelligent blending of journalism, scholarship, and memoir."

--- Pam Kingsbury, Library Journal

"Insightful...The essays in the collection (which can easily be torn through, though should really be savored) contain observations on an eclectic array of subjects...Like the glass in a kaleidoscope, Jamison's fine-tuned attention seems capable of refracting whatever subject it touches. When I finally looked up from the page it was with a renewed sense of wonder."

--- Cornelia Channing, The Paris Review

"Leslie Jamison is a master of blending memoir, criticism and journalism...[her] characteristic fusion of the intellectual and emotional is in full force here, cementing comparisons of her work to that of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag."

--- Christy Lynch, Bookpage

"Even as she documents the experiences of others--Sri Lankan soldiers, Second Life superusers, eminent writers and photographers--Jamison is keenly aware of how her personal experiences shape the way she reports their stories. It's this knowledge that propels the collection, along with her rejection of cynicism in favor of being open to new ideas and experiences, no matter how foreign they may seem."

--- Maris Kreizman, Pacific Standard

"Jamison is one of my favorite working essayists...[In] Make It Scream, Make It Burn [she] dances between the personal, the critical, and the observational, showing her deftness when it comes to each form." --- Jeva Lange, The Week

"Magnetizing and thought-provoking...An edgy spirit of inquiry, a penchant for sharing personal experiences, and incandescent writing skills make Jamison an exciting premier essayist."--- Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Leslie Jamison is a writer of supreme eloquence and intelligence who deftly combines journalistic, critical and memoiristic approaches to produce essays that linger long in the memory." --- LitHub

"Jamison interrogates a variety of fascinating subjects, including her own life, in her praiseworthy second essay collection... Make It Scream, Make It Burn confirms the praise heaped on 2014's The Empathy Exams for her uncanny ability to blend perceptive reportage with intensely personal essays in consistently fresh, dynamic prose." --- Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness

MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN is a collection of fourteen essays exploring the dynamics of haunting and obsession. I look at how we are defined by what we can't ever fully grasp, from the ghosts of possible prior lives to the perpetually unfinished work of documentary art, from the alternate selves of our online avatars to the specters of broken romances. If my first collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, explored the perilous allure of empathy, this collection examines what happens not when we look but when we can't look away-when we find ourselves consumed by desire or fascination.

The structure of MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN serves as a mirror image to The Empathy Exams. Whereas the latter started with the personal and gradually turned outward, MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN progresses from the outward-looking to the deeply personal. It begins with a trio of pieces of longform reportage: an account of the "loneliest whale in the world" and his devoted followers, an exploration of children who vividly member their past lives, and an examination of those who find community in the virtual world of Second Life. In the pages that follow, it takes readers to Sri Lanka to survey the residue of its Civil War, offers the definitive critical account of an outsider artist's 25-year documentary photography project on both sides of the US/Mexico border, and ruminates on a museum devoted to the breakups of ordinary strangers. I ultimately turn to the achingly personal, examining my own life as a site of strangeness and mystery, considering the dynamics of obsession, haunting, and longing in essays about weddings, infidelity, elopement in Las Vegas, becoming a stepmother, and my own pregnancy juxtaposed against an eating disorder years before. These are essays about how we are composed by what we long for, and by living in uneasy relation to what we have.

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Make It Scream, Make It Burn - Leslie Jamison

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Pre-order on IndieBound . Pre-order on Amazon . Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ONE OF THE FALL'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS: Time, Entertainment Weekly, O, Oprah Magazine, Boston Globe, Seattle Times, BuzzFeed, Newsweek, Bustle, Woman's Day, Nylon, BookP

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The Bard of Horror takes a gastronomical tour of the movie-theater concession stand -- all hail the cholesterol-lowering properties of diet soda

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A fascinating informational argument with 3D visuals

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A fascinating informational argument with 3D visuals

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Henry Fountain and Jeremy WhiteDec. 13, 2021

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Rising From the Antarctic, a Climate Alarm (Published 2021)

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Wilder winds are altering crucial currents. The sea is releasing ancient carbon dioxide. Vast ice shelves are melting from below. See why the experts are increasingly alarmed.

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An intimate, impertinent, and incisive collection about race, progress, and hypocrisy from Jill Louise Busby, aka Jillisblack.

Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in Diversity & Inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of Race, Power, and Privilege and delivered over two-hundred workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area.

In 2016, fed up with what passed as progressive in the Pacific Northwest, Busby uploaded a one-minute video about race, white institutions, and faux liberalism to Instagram. The video received millions of views across social platforms. As her pithy persona Jillisblack became an "it-voice" weighing in on all things race-based, Jill began to notice parallels between her performance of "diversity" in the white corporate world and her performance of "wokeness" for her followers. Both, she realized, were scripted.
Unfollow Me is a memoir-in-essays about these scripts; it's about tokenism, micro-fame, and inhabiting spaces-real and virtual, black and white-where complicity is the price of entry. Busby's social commentary manages to be both wryly funny and achingly open-hearted as she recounts her shape-shifting moves among the subtle hierarchies of progressive communities. Unfollow Me is a sharply personal and self-questioning critique of white fragility (and other words for racism), respectability politics (and other words for shame), and all the places where fear masquerades as progress.

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An intimate, impertinent, and incisive collection about race, progress, and hypocrisy from Jill Louise Busby, aka Jillisblack. Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in Diversity & Inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of Race, Power, and Privilege and delivered over two-hundred workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area.

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I'm A Trans Athlete Struggling to Compete Fairly 

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I'm A Trans Athlete Struggling to Compete Fairly 

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Digital Essay

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Opinion | I’m a Trans Runner, and You Might Not Like What I Have to Say (Published 2021)

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Trans athletes are trapped in a culture war. I’m not a cheater, but I may have an unfair advantage.

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If you read this just right, you'll pick up a bit of satire just past the humor and sarcasm. Maybe this is about more than just chocolate. But if not, it's still a fun read with good word play.https://www.cbsnews.com/news/faith-salie-on-the-bittersweet-truth-about-her-love-of-chocolate/

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If you read this just right, you'll pick up a bit of satire just past the humor and sarcasm. Maybe this is about more than just chocolate. But if not, it's still a fun read with good word play.https://www.cbsnews.com/news/faith-salie-on-the-bittersweet-truth-about-her-love-of-chocolate/

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Faith Salie on the bittersweet truth about her love of chocolate

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The “Sunday Morning” contributor says she doesn’t need the esoteric additives in competing varieties of milk, dark and white chocolate to make her go for the cacao

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The Reckonings THE RECKONINGS
Usually it is a woman who asks the question-always the same question. She is sitting near the door in the last row of the auditorium, having spent the last hour listening to me talk about what it means to have once been kidnapped and raped by a man I loved, a man with whom I lived, a man who even before the kidnapping had already violated me in every way you might imagine possible, especially if you were a man like him. Someone else in the audience asks what happened to the man, and I explain how he got away, how he is a fugitive living in Venezuela, raising a new family. This is not the ending anyone expects.

Now the woman has a question. She raises her hand, and when I call on her, always last, she stands and speaks in a clear, assertive voice: "What do you want to have happen to him, to the man who did this to you?" By "this" I know she means not only the actual crime the man committed but also all of the therapy, the nightmares and panic attacks, the prescribed medication and self-medication, the healing and self-harm. "I mean, you probably want him dead, right?"

No, I think. "No," I say out loud. Her expression crumples; she looks confused. Everyone in the audience looks confused. This isn't supposed to be how the story ends; it's not the ending they want for themselves, for me.

The women at the book club don't want this ending either. They are sitting around a long oak dining table in the home of our gracious host, who brings food out in many courses, during each of which the wine flows freely. They ask questions, mostly bookish ones, but eventually the conversation turns to the man I lived with, to how he got away.

"I'd kill him for you," one says.

"I'd kill him on the spot," says another.

They carry guns in their purses, they have told me. Maybe they are angry enough to use them.

One brings up a story she heard earlier in the day: a local man has been convicted of a boy's murder. The boy was seven when the local man raped him; he turned eight on the day the local man burned him alive. The boy survived long enough to implicate the man, who was charged with capital murder after the boy died. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to forty years in prison.

"Justice has been served," one of the women in the book club says.

"How is this justice?" asks another. "He's going to spend the next forty years living off our taxes."

"He should be burned alive," the host says, "the same way he tried to kill that boy."

She has been quiet the entire evening, in and out of the kitchen, up and down from her chair. Now she is seated at the head of the table, looking at her hands, which twist and untwist an ironed napkin over the middle of her plate. "What do you want to have happen to him?" she asks me.

This woman, like every other woman who asks the question, sits with her back to the wall, like I do when I have the choice, or near the door in the last row of every auditorium. Sometimes she is my mother's age, or my age: she wears oversized sweaters, little makeup, pulls back her hair in a simple bun. She does not want attention. She has children, like I do, and like I do, she sometimes struggles to love them well. She will tell me this after I have finished answering questions, when I am sitting at a little table signing books. She has a story that is similar to mine "in ways," and she doesn't even know what to feel about it anymore.

Sometimes the woman sitting near the door, or against the wall, is an old woman with crepe paper hands. Sometimes she is not a woman but a man-an old man my father's age in a ten-gallon hat, who tells me he was raped by an uncle when he was the age of my son. Or the person who asks the question is a man young enough to be my son if I had started much earlier, who tells me the question is for himself, or for his girlfriend. They both have a story like mine, he says, and they have not yet found an ending to it. I am surprised at how the people sitting near the door in the last row of the auditorium always have a story like mine.

I carry these stories with me because I don't know what else to do with them. The details may differ. If it is not the story of an abusive lover, perhaps it is a mother, or a father, or an uncle; or it is the story of a friend who has been killed by a stranger while trying to do the right thing, or a woman who is shot in the back of the head while asking for help; it might be a story about the abuse of power, or authority, of the slow violence of bureaucracy, of the way some people are born immune from punishment and others spend whole lifetimes being punished in ways they did nothing to deserve.

In my story, there was a man I once loved very much, and because of the self-destructive way in which I loved him, I didn't want to leave him when he abused me first with his words and then with his fists. I told myself I could fix him. That this wasn't who he was, not really. I let him keep showing me who he really was until I finally believed him and left.

I had already lived a few lives by that time, I thought-a farm girl from Missouri, a door-to-door steak salesperson, a sex worker, a model in New York, a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault-but I was afraid none of these lives had sufficiently prepared me to live the one I wanted more than anything else. I had only just begun thinking of myself as a writer around that time, but I told myself I had probably not read enough books, had not visited enough continents, was not smart enough or wise enough, didn't have anything to say, and no one would want to hear it if I did. I thought there had been a mistake in the cosmic register. Somewhere there was another Lacy Johnson who could keep straight when to use lay instead of lie, who actually belonged in all the places I began finding myself, who deserved all the good things that suddenly seemed to be happening to me.

This is all to say that the worst violence that man committed was not against my body but against the story I told about the person I believed myself to be.

I was twenty-one when that man kidnapped and raped me and tried, but failed, to kill me. The man got away, and I got away; he is a fugitive living in Venezuela, and I am a writer of books. The last one I wrote was about him, about the day he meant to kill me but I lived. It was not easy, not the writing and not the living-not until I often found myself standing in front of strangers telling them there is justice for me in standing here, in this room, alive and breathing and telling my story with my own voice.

It is not the ending to the story anyone expects-not even the one they want, because they want a return, a redemption, a retrieval of all I had lost for my part in the story; they want suffering for him. They want blood, guts, gore.

Now that would be justice, they think.

My mom tells me she wants him dead. She has just read the book-even though I told her not to, even though she told me she wouldn't. She, like the woman sitting at the head of the table in the book club and like the woman sitting near the door in the last row of the auditorium, feels unsatisfied by the story I have told about my life, because it cannot be reconciled to all she has been told about how these things should end: that the man who did the terrible thing should suffer as much as I have suffered, and as much as she has suffered, if not more. In all of the movies she has seen, this is how it goes: the person who has done a terrible thing falls from a very tall building, or is incinerated in a ball of white-hot flames, or is shot in the dark by police, or at the very least is led away in handcuffs. She wants an ending like that for herself, for me.

I also watch these movies on occasion, and I admit there is a certain satisfaction when Uma Thurman's Beatrix Kiddo finally kills Bill on the patio of his villa with the five-point exploding heart technique. He knows what he has done, why she has come; he does not even try to stop her. I take pleasure watching Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander condemn her rapist by tattooing that word into his chest. She violates him in the same ways he violated her, and a few more for good measure. When Sophie Turner's Sansa Stark allows Ramsay's own dogs to eat him alive, she smiles a little, and there is something in me that smiles also. These men deserve this punishment, the stories tell us, and it feels good to see someone get what he deserves.

I know this is spectacle, entertainment, not actual life, though life also has its share of spectacles. I would be horrified, find I often am, to see anyone actually murdered, much less tortured, out of some thirst for revenge. The spectacle reinforces over and over a story I want to believe about the world even though I have never yet witnessed it for myself: that everything will come out right in the end, that bad things eventually happen to bad people, that good people eventually receive all the blessings they deserve. Everyone gets their just desserts, the story tells me so I can go on.

But what if that doesn't happen? What if, as in my story, the person who does the terrible thing more or less gets away with it? Does that mean there is no justice to be had or made or found? What does justice look like in a situation where the crime is not intimate and personal but massive and public, and there is no one person to blame? What if the wrong person is blamed? What if we punish the right person but in the course of doing so cause unnecessary pain? What if we ourselves feel pain by performing this duty of punishing person after person, day after day? How could we not? What does justice look like in these situations? Is justice even a "real" thing that any of us can achieve at all?

There is a story we have each heard from birth that when someone does something bad, something bad should happen to that person in return and that this turnabout is justice. This story is a very old one, I've learned, older even than the law of an eye for an eye we find in the Old Testament, traceable back to the pre-Babylonian period, to the Code of Hammurabi, the oldest surviving record of ancient law:

If a man has put out the eye of a free man, put out his eye.

If he breaks the bone of a free man, break his bone.

If he puts out the eye of a serf, or breaks the bone of a serf, he shall pay one mina of silver.

This is the lex talionis-the law of retaliation-written more than five thousand years ago when vengeance ran amok, when a man might steal his neighbor's cow, for instance, and the neighbor would respond by murdering that neighbor's entire family. As we tell it now, the lex talionis is mandate-you must put out his eye-but the law was in fact meant to put a limit on vengeful action, to curb what humans understood to be our baser instincts.

Then, as now, we want to transform our suffering: to take a pain we experience and change it into the satisfaction of causing pain for someone else. We watch Clint Eastwood as Josey Wales turn his grief into hatred in order to pick up a gun, and watch Ving Rhames as Marsellus Wallace turn his terror and near annihilation into the promise of "going medieval" on his rapists, and us as his audience into accessories to all the suffering this promise might mean.

"To see another suffer is pleasant," Nietzsche writes; "to make another suffer is still more pleasant." He's thinking in particular of how tempting it is to imagine punishment as a kind of redemption for guilt-the German word shuld means both "guilt" and "debt," and one primary meaning of the word redemption was to buy that debt back-a trick of the mind that tells us that every injury has some equivalent of pain or sacrifice. There is, as Nietzsche points out, a strange accounting in this: a crime creates a debt; the criminal becomes a debtor, the victim his creditor, whose compensation is the particular pleasure of bearing witness to a cruel and exacting punishment.

Is that justice? Would I cheer, and cry, and jump up and down if the man who kidnapped and raped me were kidnapped and raped, and beaten, if I could grind him down with my rage until there was almost nothing left of him? If I could watch him suffer in all the ways he made me suffer or, better yet, cause that suffering myself? The story tells me to imagine it would feel satisfying: a release of adrenaline or perhaps the relief from it. Catharsis: a cleansing. To be honest, I'm not sure what justice is supposed to feel like. There is a shut place I carry inside me. If I caused him to suffer, would that go away?

I have found photographs of him on the Internet that suggest he is living with a woman who has given birth to two of his children, both girls. In the photos, he is as unhappy in his new life as he ever was in the one he lived with me. On vacation, he grows sullen because the trip isn't going his way, and when the family joins him in the ocean he frowns and looks away from the camera, afraid of being recognized, of what the photograph will reveal. The older daughter, who is the same age as my son, sits on her mother's lap, the mother who is love and safety, who makes a wall with her body between the daughter and him. Does he notice she does this? He holds the baby a little above his lap and away from his body. At a party, he dances back and forth in front of the children, and also their parents who are watching, because he has an audience, and in public he performs a version of himself who is charming, who is fun to be around, who is everything anyone ever wanted a person to be. Behind closed doors, he is angry and irritable, a man so fragile and insecure that he rages at anyone who does not reflect back the version of himself he wants to see. This is why his wife and daughters look, in the photographs, a little hollowed out inside. I can see everything he is doing to them. Everything he has already done.

You probably want him dead, strangers tell me.

"If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale," Simone Weil once wrote. In the years since I left that man, I have fallen in love many times, made a father out of a man I met on the Internet. I have created life, written whole worlds, outlined entire moral geographies for two barely domesticated children, and have learned to welcome the strangers who arrive at the doorstep of my soul. I've called myself a writer now more than half of my life, and during all this time, I have learned that sometimes the hardest and most important work I've done has meant turning a story I couldn't tell into one that I can-and that this practice on its own is one not only of discovery but of healing.

Is justice a story about healing? Justice is blind, we are told; it is served, maybe like a severed head on a plate. It is a destination, the path to which is long and sometimes crooked and bent. The Roman emperor Nero called it justice when he threw Christians to the beasts in the Colosseum. For some, justice means sticking to the laws, or enforcing them. For others, it means helping friends and harming enemies. Aristotle observed that justice, like language, is a "special characteristic" of humans. Plato suggested that justice is "an inward grace." "Might is right" is another enduring view-might meaning violence, of course, and violence being the opposite of grace.

More than anything else, what I want is a reckoning. Not only for myself, not only for him. I want it for everyone who asks the question: the woman with the crepe paper hands, the man in the ten-gallon hat, the boy who burned and his mother who must have barely lived. I want a reckoning for the woman shot in the back of the head and the man killed while running away-for the children who survive him. I want a reckoning for the person who believes he deserves to take life, and for the person who has been sentenced to offer his. I want a reckoning for all the wars politicians ask our children to fight on their behalf, and for all the children those wars fail to protect. I want a long line of reckonings. I want the truth told back to us. I want the lies laid bare.

"No," I say to the woman who has asked the question from the back of the room, or from against the wall, or sitting at the head of the table. "I don't want him dead. I want him to admit all the things he did, to my face, in public, and then to spend the rest of his life in service to other people's joy." She is struck silent and leans back in her seat.

This is the ending I want. I don't want him dead. I don't even want him to suffer. More pain creates more sorrow, sometimes generations of sorrow, and it amplifies injustice rather than cancels it out. I want to let go of my anger and fear and pain. I want to let go of the hatred and enmity and spite. I want that shut place to open. The ending I want is inside.

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The Reckonings THE RECKONINGS Usually it is a woman who asks the question-always the same question.

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Campo, CA, Nov. 18, 2004 Yesterday long-distance hiker Scott Williamson, 32, stepped off the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) at California's border with Mexico, completing the first-ever continuous "yo-yo," or round-trip of the 2,560-mile trail that stretches from the Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington. This was Williamson's sixth bid to yo-yo the PCT.

Your father and the man known as Mr. Beer find the deaf girl at a store in town and they learn that she's been chasing you for 700 miles.

When they bring her to your campsite, you don't know it, but that's the moment your grief finally starts to lift. That's when you find what you need, what you have always needed. It's a year ago, May 14, and maybe that's where your story begins.

But starting there leaves out too much. It leaves out the crazy man with the gun and the miracle of the corned beef hash and that sad day on the river when the magic ducks honor the dead boy. It doesn't even mention Hobo Joe and Walking Carrot and The Wall and The Abominable Slow Man and Real Fat. And what about the nightmares? What about the years of failure? What about the autumn of loss, the seasons of mourning?

To understand those things, it's better to begin with the day searchers find a bear feeding on your best friend's body. Or the afternoon you lose the deaf woman. Too grim? It's your story, and it's filled with the strangest and most unexpected gifts, so maybe it's best to begin on the rock in the snowfield where you find her again. But that's too happy. It's misleading. What about in a spot you know all too well, where you have spent way too much time: under sodden skies and sneering peaks during an early winter blizzard, as you sink to your thighs and know that you are-once again-doomed to defeat?

You've always struggled with beginnings and endings. How can anyone expect you to say when you started, when you finished? Might as well ask when you decided to start living.

Still, an epic journey-and if your journey is anything, it's definitely epic-must begin somewhere. The first step, the first time, out of Mexico? That's accurate, but inadequate. The victorious stroll last November into the crowd of photographers and friends? Touching, but incomplete. No, better to begin in the midst of setback, struggling. Better to start with what you know. Better to start with isolation and pain.

It is exactly ten minutes until five in the afternoon-you remember that because the man in the hooded sweatshirt asks you what time it is and you tell him, right before he shoots you in the face. It is 4:50 in the afternoon on January 20, 1996, and you aren't scheduled to work that day but when the convenience store owner calls and asks you to come in you say yes, because you can always use extra cash. You work hard when you work-tree-feller, logger, construction-so you can take off for months at a time, and such an approach to labor and to life has made for many sublime sunrises and peaceful sunsets and occasional moments of Zen oneness with nature and...a job in a convenience store. You are reading an article in The New Yorker when the man in the hooded sweatshirt comes in and asks what time it is and you look at your watch and tell him and then you notice he seems nervous, his eyes are darting, he is rocking back and forth, and then he lifts something and points it at you and you feel heat and searing pain on your cheek.

The bullet enters the left side of your face, clips your jaw, rips through flesh and stops. You run to the back of the store and the door is locked so you hit it with your shoulder. It is a steel door with a deadbolt but you tear it from the wall. The man in the hooded sweatshirt follows and fires six more rounds and you keep running. You keep running and running until you see a man and a woman and their young child lifting groceries out of their car and you tell them you've been shot.

They take you inside and you call 911 and you worry because even with a towel you're dripping blood on their floor.

The doctors give you morphine and they check for nerve damage. They tell you that the salivary gland on the left side of your mouth might never function again. They tell you it's too risky to remove the bullet, which is lodged near your spine, and that another quarter of an inch and you would be paralyzed. You leave the hospital and you have nightmares and get spooked when you see men in hooded sweatshirts and you resolve to change your life.

Some men might bend their will toward jobs with desks and health insurance and 401Ks, away from double shifts at convenience stores. Not you. You decide that life is short, that the future is uncertain. You decide that time is precious. You have already hiked from Mexico to Canada once, a huge summer trek on the Pacific Crest Trail. It was wonderful, but now that you've been shot in the face and reevaluated your life, you want more than wonderful. You decide you will hike from Mexico to Canada again, but this time, rather than celebrating at the border, you will turn around and hike back to Mexico. You will need to travel lighter this time and pack smarter and move very, very fast to beat the winter storms before they make the southbound journey impossible. You will need to hike more than 25 miles a day, every day, for almost 7 months. No one has ever accomplished such a feat before. No one has even tried it. Maybe the moment you make the decision is the best place of all to start.

But even that's not right. No, if you want the best beginning to your story-the real beginning, the right beginning-you need to start with the kid. The first time you see him, he is crouching next to a spring at the bottom of a canyon, feral, like a wild child. It's May 3, 1993, and you have been hiking for a week, on your way to Canada on the PCT, one way, just like any other young man longing to escape life and find himself. The kid is 17 years old, skinny and overpacked and he's in trouble. That's the first thing you notice. His pack must weigh 90 pounds-it's bigger than he is. He carries a gleaming stove, and a fat down sleeping bag. Shiny pots and kettles hang from his pack. Countless straps and bungee cords. He has the newest and heaviest of everything. A kid who must have read some books, who has no idea that the secret to happiness out here is packing light and moving fast. He reminds you of yourself, when you first made the trip the year before. You made it to Oregon, and you suffered, and you learned, so this time you've come stripped down. This time, you carry only 20 pounds.

You're not very nice to him. You don't need extra baggage of any kind on your hike. That's something else you've learned. But he's delighted to be outdoors, delighted to meet you, delighted to learn from you. He's even delighted to learn how little you think of his style. He tags along, and every day he digs a hole and buries a piece of equipment, or a piece of clothing. He wants to do it like you.

You have never met such a person before. Wake at 4 a.m. for a predawn march? No problem. Log 45 miles in one day? Can do. Climb every mountain, ford a gazillion streams? Now, that's living!! You have no idea about the sadness he carries, the sadness he will bequeath to you.

It's funny-you're only 21 and already you have chosen a life of long-distance hikes and labor high up in trees and meticulous, solitary planning and you spend more time alone on the Pacific Crest Trail than probably any person on earth, but every so often a person crashes into your life and even if you're careful, even if you're not very welcoming at first, even if you're not very nice, your plans get all screwed up.

When he leaves the trail to return to his mother's house, you're surprised. Not that he's leaving-even burying so many things, the kid was still carrying too much. You're surprised that you miss him.

Then, one day in early July, at the post office in Sierra City, you see his name in a register: Kenny Gould. He's come back and he is trying to catch you. He doesn't realize he's already ahead of you. Every few days you see his name in another log. The kid is humping 40 miles a day. You cover distances like that every once in a while, but the kid is doing it day after day. No one can keep up that pace.

You didn't make this trip to baby-sit anyone, to save anyone from himself. You didn't start in Mexico in order to make friends. But something happens. It's funny how a man's plans can change, in spite of himself. You start logging monster distances, too. It takes you 2 weeks to catch him. When you find him at Crater Lake, in Oregon, he is carrying next to nothing. He has taken scissors and a knife to his pack, slicing off all the hanging straps. When the kid does something, he's all in. That summer, you're all in, too. You hike together through the rest of Oregon and all of Washington, to Canada. Over campfires and at sunrise and in meadows you talk about the misapplication of technology in the world, how it is serving powerful interests rather than people. He's just a kid and you're barely an adult. You talk about how society is going down the tubes, how neither of you will be sucked into the machine. You talk about the tricky business of living in a troubled world without becoming part of the trouble. He is impulsive, carefree-sometimes to a fault. You help him settle down, think things through. And you are meticulous, painstaking-sometimes to a fault. Hiking with Kenny, you quit planning so much and start living more. Kenny talks about how nothing is impossible. You can't help it. You believe him.

The next summer, while Kenny climbs in Yosemite, you hike the Continental Divide Trail, from Canada to Mexico. The summer after that-Kenny's still climbing, and you hear he's going through some tough times with his family-you travel the Appalachian Trail, but you tack on the Florida Trail first, then walk 450 miles of road between the two. You want to make it from Florida to Maine. Now you have achieved the Triple Crown of long-distance hiking, which is as rare as it sounds. What's next?

The kid has an idea. You run into him that fall at a meeting of long-distance hikers. His folks have split up and he's spent a little time in a psych ward where the doctors told him he's got a mental illness, and he's ashamed about that, but you tell him it's no big deal, they're just words, like "flu" or "virus," that he doesn't have anything to feel bad about. He appreciates that, it makes him feel better. Do you want to hear his idea? You do.

What if next year, Kenny asks, you try something really ambitious? What if next year, you hike the PCT again? But this time, instead of stopping in Canada, what if you turn around and hoof it back to Mexico? And what if he tags along? You promise to think about it. And then the man in the hood walks into the convenience store and you decide life is short and a man can spend too much time thinking and you decide that you and Kenny will embark on a great adventure.

You lug your sewing machine up from Richmond to Kenny's mom's house in the Sierra foothills, in Auburn, California. One night she looks in and sees you and Kenny, both longhaired and bearded and plotting, each one of you hunched over a sewing machine. You are sewing your own sleeping quilts and she shakes her head at her woolly son and his woolly friend and thinks, "Gee, this is never going to work." But she's smiling and laughing and while you might not know about it, she knows the sadness that her son carries and you seem like such a nice boy and Kenny seems so at peace when he's with you-she worries often about him but never when he's with you.

She takes you boys-to her, you are boys-to dinner at Auburn's Mongolian Barbecue for all-you-can-eat dinners and the Chinese proprietor smiles when he sees the three of you coming, and you might not know it, but Kenny's mom knows, he hates the sight of you three, because you and Kenny sit at the table for hours, plotting adventures and talking about the trail and spinning dreams, but mostly piling bowl after bowl after bowl full of rice and broccoli and spinach and bamboo shoots, mashing the food down, and eating and mashing it down some more and eating some more and it's a wonder you don't drive that restaurant out of business. Kenny's mom loves her son and she's beginning to love you but she can't help it, she feels sorry for that little Chinese man.

A young man can imagine great adventures in the foothills, in the winter, over sewing machines and bowls of rice and vegetables. And you do. You both do. But the adventure is greater than even you can imagine. It's funny. For all your great plans, the greatest times happen when the plans fall apart. It happens after a snowstorm-there are so many snowstorms in the life you have chosen-and you and Kenny are short on food, so you bushwhack 43 miles through the mountains to the nearest town and you know it's going to take at least three days to even make it back to the trail. You buy onions, and garlic and lemons and a roll of tinfoil and a 6-pound bag of rice and some fishing gear. Not what most people think of as fishing gear. No, you buy two spools and a couple of hooks and a few lures.

And now you are standing in the middle of a river in a hidden canyon, holding a stick. Standing upstream, holding another stick, is your hiking partner, who has somehow become your best friend. The stream carves through a canyon, which slices through a section of California's High Sierra that is very difficult to find, even on a map. You have tied the hook to one end of the spool and flung it into the river. It is a foolish, absurd way to fish, but in hidden valleys, life is foolish and absurd and bountiful and the word "failure" doesn't mean much. Kenny catches a fish. Then you. Golden trout. You have been a vegan for five years. But Kenny has taught you, so, just like him, you look into the golden trout's eyes and you bash its head on a rock and you feel its life slipping from its body and you have always thought of meat as something people buy in grocery stores, but you will never think this way again. Years later you will say that this is the moment you learned that death not only is part of life, but that death can sustain life. For three days and nights you and Kenny toss lines into clear water and make your way upstream and east, along the river and up a snowy path toward the Pacific Crest Trail and for breakfast and lunch and dinner you feast on golden trout over crackling fires and the days and nights are cold, but you are warm and well-fed and alone and together in a place that is difficult to find, even on a map. He tells you wild, hilarious stories about the people he met in the psych ward, which always make you laugh. And he calls you "Duckface," because you carry a rubber duck that you found in the street in a mountain town and sometimes you start quacking, which always makes Kenny laugh.

You make the turn in Canada and head south and make it all the way to Reds Meadow, near Mammoth, where it starts snowing on October 18 and doesn't stop until a week and 5 feet later. It is your first and most glorious failure.

You try again the next year, alone, because Kenny has taken up whitewater rafting, and he's busy with that. You struggle through so much snow on the way north that you stop at the Canadian border. The next year, you read the weather reports and you know it's impossible, so you start in Canada and take a leisurely stroll south with your girlfriend, a poet and student named Rebecca. You try to make it both ways in 1999 and 2000, but each time, blizzards stop you before you're even out of Southern California.

The rest of your life? Off the trail? There are the tree-felling jobs, and a winter spent logging in Maine with Rebecca, but with all the trips and hiking, a relationship is tough and you split up. Your mother has been sick with lung cancer for a few years. She's a chain-smoker, and that makes you angry, and things have never been easy between you two, with her always telling you to get a regular job, buy a house, settle down. And besides, she carries her own sadness. People scare her, and open spaces and new things, so she avoids all that. When you were a kid, and friends came over, she would hide in a room. Those friends remember fleeting glimpses of her, in a hat and dark sunglasses, peering from behind a door. "Agoraphobic," doctors said, but to you, it's just a word. She's your mother. The last summer of her life, you don't hike. She dies in October 2001 and you don't hike the next year either.

That summer, on July 6, you meet a pretty girl with sun-streaked hair outside a restaurant called Chop Stix, near Santa Cruz, where you're doing some tree work. A month later, you and the pretty girl, a climber and acupuncture student named Michelle Clark, move in together. Women have always been attracted to you, and you to them. And in January, you're on a dayhike together and you tell her that come spring, you think you're going to try yo-yoing the PCT again and she says that's nice, what exactly does that mean? Well, it means you might be gone for 7 months. She's not happy, but she's a climber and a good sport, she believes in you, so she works on your résumé and on letters trying to drum up publicity and sponsors and she helps organize a slide show and rents a hall in Santa Cruz and gets some local musicians and she helps you raise $250. Then she drives you to the border, and when you call her after your first day and tell her your knee hurts, she puts together a package of moxa and ginger-Michelle practices Chinese medicine, too-and sends it to you.

Your knee gets better, but the weather worsens. You have never seen so much snow, so early in the season. Every day it dumps more and at Cedar Grove, on June 7, 2003, you hike for 15 hours and make it exactly 15 miles. That's when you quit. It's your fifth try, your fifth failure. You don't know if you'll ever try again.

Kenny? The kid who gave your story the best beginning, the right beginning? While you're trying to yo-yo the PCT, Kenny is making himself into one of the premier extreme kayakers in North America. While you're financing your hikes by climbing giant redwoods and little fruit trees in Santa Cruz, Kenny is scaling communications towers for pay near Auburn, hanging vinyl on tall buildings. One day in the spring of 1999, you visit him at his mom's and while you're on a dayhike together, he tells you he's been having a tough time, that he has to take pills every day, just to feel normal. You hadn't known, but you aren't shocked. Kenny had never been what you would call normal. You find out later that different doctors called Kenny's difficulties different things. Bipolar disorder. Schizoaffective disorder. Brief reactive psychosis related to stress. It doesn't matter to you. They're just words. Kenny is your partner, your best friend. Somewhere along the way, Kenny has become your brother.

In the early winter of 2002, you climb North Palisade, a 14,000-footer. It's so cold your equipment is freezing, and you have to take your gloves off to brush the ice away and eventually your fingers freeze up and you have to turn back, just 300 vertical feet short of the summit. You don't know it, but Kenny returns a few weeks later and completes the climb.

You talk to him again that spring. You and Michelle have driven up north and you're going to hike to a waterfall that Kenny took you to once, down a remote canyon of the American River. You call him from a pay phone, near the river. Does Kenny remember the waterfall? Can he give you some tips on how to get there? Does he? Can he? There's a slot canyon, and you can rappel down it, and the bottom is hidden, but unbelievably beautiful, another world! It's incredible! It's amazing! Kenny is so enthusiastic, shouting so loud, you have to hold the phone away from your ear, smiling. You remember that. It's funny the things you remember. Michelle, standing next to you, can hear him, too. She has never met Kenny, but she has heard you talk about him, has seen your scrapbooks filled with pictures and writings from him. You don't know it, but she worries about you a lot. This is the first time she hears his voice, and she loves how it makes you smile. You hear from him one more time-in early September. He calls and leaves a message-"Hey, it's me, call me back," but you're busy. Would things have turned out differently if you had called him?

You don't know it, but things are bad. The sadness isn't coming and going anymore. It's staying. He checks himself into the hospital, but that doesn't work. He takes medication, but that doesn't work. Now he's doing free solo climbs, running riskier and more dangerous falls. He talks to people about kayaking off Yosemite Falls with a parachute. He talks about skydiving in a kayak, "to see how it handles."

Kenny's mom tries to help, but she doesn't know what to do. She wishes Kenny had a kindred spirit in his family-someone who could understand him. But his dad and his older brother are doctors, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of men, and Kenny has never related to that life. He has a younger sister, but what can a younger sister do? What can a mother do? Kenny's mom thinks of you. She worries about Kenny all the time, but she never worries about him when he's with you. She tells Kenny-okay, maybe she nags him a little-why doesn't he call you? Why doesn't he pick up the phone so the two of you can plan another one of your epic hikes together? But he doesn't call.

He makes eight trips to the hospital, and the doctors do their best, adjust his meds, but each trip is worse than the last. When he leaves the eighth time, he's so desperate, so crestfallen, his mom tells him she doesn't want him to ever have to go back and he says he doesn't want to go back either.

You pick up the phone on the 1st of October, 2002. No one has heard from Kenny in four days and Kenny's mom is scared, she asks if you know where he is. She calls back on the 5th. Searchers have found his truck, parked near the top of a rocky bluff. They had combed the area for days, with no luck, and then one of the searchers had looked down and seen a bear at the bottom of the cliff. It was feeding on Kenny's body.

When Kenny's mom is going through her son's things, she finds a note. It's addressed to you. It's a goodbye note. He didn't want to go back to the hospital. He hated his pills. He didn't see any other way out. You give the eulogy, on the banks of the American River, where Kenny loved to hike and fish and raft. You tell the 400 mourners that you have lost your best friend. Three other speakers say the same thing. Weird, how such a young man, carrying so much sadness, could have so many best friends.

After Kenny's friends speak, the preacher rises, walks to the front of the crowd. He begins to talk and at that instant a flock of ducks flies overhead, quacking, and they land behind him, on the river. He raises his voice and they quack louder. The preacher keeps trying, but the ducks quack so loud no one can hear what he's saying. You and Michelle look at each other. "It's him," she says.

It is a terrible winter, a season of grief, and Michelle is worried sick about you, she hopes spring will bring healing, but it doesn't. The next winter is terrible, too. You write to Kenny's mom. "How do you go on when you lose your best friend?" You talk to her once a week and she tells you she has lost a son and you have lost a mother, but now you have each other. You can't sleep. Mornings, you're bone-tired. The times you manage to drift off, you wake screaming. You wake Michelle. And some nights, Michelle wakes on her own and finds you staring at pictures of Kenny, holding the scrapbooks with records of your hikes together. You avoid other people, spend more and more time alone. She doesn't know what to do. Ever since she met you, she has worried about you. But she never worried when you were with Kenny. She tells you to get outside, to hike, to climb. Michelle knows the climbing community in Santa Cruz, they're her friends, so she calls them. She calls people she knows, asks them if they'll climb with you, then tells you-okay, maybe she nags a little-that they're waiting for your call, but you don't call. Sometimes, desperate, she prays. Not to God. She prays to Kenny.

You and Michelle break up in February-it just got too intense-and you don't have any work lined up, or anything else tying you down, so you try again. You leave Mexico April 22, 2004. You're not sure you're going to yo-yo. You're not sure of anything.

On the trail, you grieve for Kenny, but you don't worry about him anymore. You don't have to. And you don't have to worry about how sick your mother is, or what she wants you to do with your life, or the sadness she carries behind her dark sunglasses, in her dark little room. You don't have to worry about your next job, or packing, or whether you are going to attempt the hike again. All you have to worry about are water and food and shelter and it's liberating. Maybe no man is an island, but god the waters can be choppy, they can drown a man if he's not careful and there is something to be said for hiking alone in the Sierra in early spring, with no girlfriend, no job, no family, no skinny kid carrying unbearable sadness in his stripped-down, strapless pack. You have your beans and corn chips and tarp and sleeping quilt. You think you have everything you need. You're so wrong.

When your dad and the man known as Mr. Beer take you to her, the first thing you notice about the deaf girl is how weathered she looks, how worn-down. She scribbles notes. She says she has been trying to catch you since she left Mexico two weeks ago, four days after you. You work that out in your head. She has been covering more than 30 miles a day. She says she has covered all of Southern California without a trail map. She says she is trying to break the women's speed record from Mexico to Canada.

As you scribble back and forth, literally comparing notes, you look at her again. She has just walked through a section of the American West where water sources are sometimes 30 miles apart, where the best way to locate them is with a map, and the second best way by sound. She has just hiked through a region infested with rattlesnakes (she has seen 10). And here she is, to your eyes malnourished, still without a map, cheerfully outlining her plans to race to Canada.

Later, when you remember meeting Patti, and you talk to strangers about things like inner peace and karma and living in harmony with the universe, you will apologize; use words like "cheesy" and "new-agey." But here, late at night next to the Current River, you can't ignore what you see. What you feel. It's spooky. It shakes you a little. You have only met one other person in your life who approached absurd difficulties and daunting challenges with such unreasonable joy, such blithe good humor. Climb every mountain? Ford a gazillion streams? Now that's living. You never thought you would run into anyone else like him. Can a man be sad and bursting with joy all at once?

The next morning, your father drives away-he'd come all the way down from Richmond just to see you for a night-and the man known as Mr. Beer, who you met on the trail and camped with for one night, takes off. Then it's just you and the deaf girl, Patti Haskins. She has a master's degree in biochemistry, and she works at a day-care center in Yosemite Valley. She's fast, but you're faster, and you move ahead. You wait an hour for her in a meadow, and then an hour and a half. Then you leave a note. Gotta go.

A man travels fastest when he travels alone. You camp alone that night, and hike the next day and it surprises you, but you're worried. And maybe you miss her a little. And at the end of that next day, skirting a snowfield, you hear a strange sound. There she is, yelling on a rock, like she knew you would find her-or she would find you. She had lost the trail, had simply continued north, mapless. It's funny how people can shake up your plans. This was going to be a solo trip. The rest of the summer, all the way to Canada, you hike together.

You learn to sign. You tell her that the Top Ramen and Cup-a-Soup she has been eating is wearing her down, that she should start eating organically, like you. She tells you that for someone who talks so much about organic food, you eat an awful lot of Snickers bars whenever you're near a store, and by the way, you should start slathering on sunscreen, like her. She sticks with Top Ramen. You stick with Snickers and bare skin.

You watch out for each other. When Patti gets sick and has to go to the bathroom 20 times one day, you worry. When you bite down on a chip and a molar on your right side breaks, you spit it out. Now the nagging about the Snickers gets intense. She spends a lot of time peering in your mouth, at the half tooth, worrying about decay and infection.

But those are minor things. They're bonding things. Life in the mountains with Patti is okay. It's more than okay. One evening, she walks to a stream to fetch water and she disappears around a bend, and then you hear her scream. It's a weird thought, you have no idea why it comes to you, but you're certain she has found a body. You have never heard such screams. You sprint down the creek, around the bend, panting. And there she is, screaming and singing. Patti is a beautiful woman, all dark hair and smooth limbs and sharp angles and she is trilling with joy. She's holding a bullfrog as big as a cantaloupe, laughing and singing. Only one other person in your life ever found such wild, outsized delight in nature.

On sunny days, you plunge into frigid alpine rivers, then scramble out and lay down in sun-soaked beds of wildflowers. On rainy nights, you huddle together underneath your tarp. And the more okay things get with Patti, the more you worry. Not about her nutrition, or her intestinal health. You are now just weeks from Canada, and you suspect that this time, you have a shot at making it all the way back. You also know how people can creep into your life and shake up your plans. You know that a man travels fastest when he travels alone. You remember the last person you loved like you love Patti. He was just a boy, and then he was a man, and it's different, of course, Patti is beautiful and soft, all smooth limbs and sharp angles. But it's the same, too. You never thought you would meet someone like him again and now you have and it scares you. You know what loss feels like. You know what loss can do to a man. You walk into Canada on August 8, 105 days after you left Mexico, 101 days after Patti started. She misses her record by a week, and since she has no money left, she catches a bus back to Yosemite. Hiking south, alone again, you cover 43 miles your first day. The second day, you walk 40 miles. The third day, 38 miles.

Late summer in the Cascades is a glorious time. Long days, and lush flowers and torrents of water and plenty of time to think. You think about Patti and your mother and your damaged salivary gland and the man who shot you, the man in the hood, and how you'd like to teach kids about the wilderness, about how tree-felling is a young man's occupation and how you're 32 and you won't be able to do it for much longer and maybe you ought to really consider college. You think about beef and spinach and coffee, you think hard about those things. You think of the long days and nights talking with Kenny about how difficult it was to be true to yourself when you were surrounded by wage slaves and soulless corporations and creeping technology, and how you told Kenny that a man couldn't spend his entire life on the PCT, the important thing was to find balance in your life, and Kenny did his best and his best wasn't enough. You wonder how the man known as Mr. Beer is doing back at home in Sapporo, Japan (which is why he's known as Mr. Beer). You think about all the hikers you have met over the years-Hobo Joe, the homeless Vietnam vet who every few years scrapes enough money together to hit the trail, and does fine until he hits a town with a liquor store, then ends up in the county jail for a few nights; and Maineiac, who lives in Maine, and Walking Carrot, who loves carrots and Real Fat, who is really fat, and The Abominable Slow Man, who is astoundingly pokey, and the Leprechaun, who stands six foot eight.

The kid? He comes to you at the oddest times. In southern Oregon, you run out of water and hike 15 miles to a stream near Mt. McGloughin to refill your bottle, but the stream is dry and it's 15 miles until the next one and you're thirsty and in trouble and then, there, right on the trail, is a water bottle, 16 ounces just sitting there and you know it's cheesy, you know it's new agey, but you can't help it, you think about death, and life, the cosmic wheel and all that, and how even when someone leaves you, maybe he's not gone at all. You feel Kenny's presence then; you know he's with you.

You think about Michelle, who really is sweet, and supportive, and beautiful and all-around great, and you wonder if the two of you might ever get together again. And you think of Rebecca, in Maine, and the poem she wrote called "The Mandible Bullet," about the convenience store shooting. Rebecca was sweet, too, and you loved that poem, you wish you still had a copy of it. And you think about other former girlfriends, and how women are great, but relationships are complicated, especially when you have a goal, and maybe you're better off not exactly in one right now. And of course you think some more of Patti, whose trail name is Silent Running, which even by trail-name standards is weird, because she's deaf, not mute.

Women are tricky. Relationships are tricky. The trail is simple. You wake at 5:30 and by six you're hiking. You hike till nine o'clock and you stop for a 15-minute meal and then you hike till the early afternoon, eat another quick meal, and then you hike a few more hours, when you stop just to chop some garlic and to mix your dried beans with water, and you hike another few hours, and then you have dinner, a leisurely 30 or 40 minutes, and then you hike until it's dark. Every day, you hike at least 35 miles, and most days, you don't see a soul. From Crater Lake to near Tahoe-1,000 miles-you don't see anyone on the trail. You're alone. Days and days alone.

Why? Because you can't survive off the trail? Because things like steady work and marriage and a house fill you with fear, because the only place you feel safe is here, strolling through fields of golden yarrow and red maids and prickly poppies and yellow and white monkey flowers, sleeping under wheeling constellations? That's what Michelle thinks. To her, God is everywhere, but she's pretty sure you only feel Him-or Her, or It, or The Great Whatever-on the trail. Or do you do it because you love deeply and grieve deeply and sometimes you don't know the difference, and you're trying to come to terms with your friend's death? That's what Kenny's mom thinks. She didn't start to feel better about Kenny until she visited the rivers he rafted and the trails he hiked-all the spots he'd been happiest. She's sure you're on a journey of acceptance and healing.

And you? What do you think?

"Kenny's death played a part," you say politely but firmly. "So I suppose you could say I did it for him. But as I've told a lot of people, the only reason to do something like this is for yourself."

You can tell the temperature within two degrees just by the viscosity of the mucus in your nose, and you can predict snow by how the air feels on your skin. But you have never been very good at explaining yourself, at dissecting your feelings, at sharing your inner life.

Still, even a man as self-contained as you, even a man who has been shot in the face and whose mother has died and whose best friend has killed himself-even a man who has responded to injury and loss and death by walking away from others and into the woods-even a man like you must feel joy and relief and a tremendous sense of accomplishment as he closes in on the goal that has eluded him for nearly a decade.

How do you feel?

"Very neutral," you say, with profound and oddly moving blockheadedness.

You reach the Mexican border on Saturday, November 13, 2004 and there to greet you are your father, who has driven 12 hours from Richmond, and Patti, who has driven 8 hours from Yosemite and Kenny's mom, who has driven 12 hours from Auburn. There is a photo crew, too, and dozens of long-distance hikers who know about you. You tell Patti you can't believe it's over. You tell her that finishing makes you sad. Kenny's mom hugs you and tells you that Kenny would be proud. And that's a sweet ending to your story, but it's not the best one. It's not the right one.

It leaves out what's next. It leaves out Patti asking you to spend more time in Yosemite, and Michelle, who has moved from Santa Cruz to Truckee, asking you to visit Truckee more often and you feeling guilty and annoyed that you can't do either-that you don't want to do either. It leaves out the way the daily e-mail with Patti becomes weekly, then biweekly, then merely occasional.

It leaves out where you are now, living in a 1984 Toyota 4×4 in the Santa Cruz mountains, taking the occasional tree-felling job. It omits the fact that until recently, fifteen rolls of slides from your trip sat in your father's freezer, because you couldn't afford to have them developed. He did it for you, as a Christmas gift. It leaves out how you can't afford to rent a room somewhere. How you can't afford to fix your tooth.

You'll figure it out. Or you won't. You turn 33 in May. You have many trips in front of you. Or you don't. The money will come. Or it won't. The answers will present themselves, or not. You have to be patient. You have to avoid gazing too far into the future. These are the lessons that any would-be yo-yo hiker must learn. You have learned them. You have to savor each day, to love the journey. A step at a time, an hour at a time. So let's pick a good hour to end your tale. There are so many to choose from. What about the afternoon in San Diego, where you and Patti drove after finishing in Mexico, where you swam in the ocean and floated on your back and marveled at how everything flows from the mountains and ends up in the sea, and you were no different; where you drank cup after cup of coffee and ate plate after plate of spinach salad? No? What about rush hour in the East Bay, stuck in traffic, doing your best to apply the lessons of the trail-the lessons of patience and acceptance and grace and being a part of the troubled society you and Kenny talked about? No? What about midday in Barney's Burgers, on the Berkeley border, where you tuck into a one-pound monster patty and a half-order of curly fries and a blackberry milkshake and spin tales about Hobo Joe and Real Fat and The Wall and the folly of long-distance hikers who leave the trail and reenter society with rage and bitterness and hatred for things like traffic jams and jobs, not realizing that those things are as much a part of life as soaring hawks and fragrant sunrises?

No? You have always had difficulty with beginnings and endings. You have been through enough grief. So why don't we pick a moment in the middle. The right ending. Let's choose a moment of peace.

It has been raining for a week. It's late July and you and Kenny have been on the trail since March 2, through blizzards and windstorms and hidden canyons filled with golden trout. And now, in Washington's Glacier Peak Wilderness, headed north, at mile 2,450, high on a ridge, your food supplies are practically gone, and you're not only cold and wet, you're hungry. A chilly, damp twilight and you throw off your packs and set up your tarp and try to build a fire to dry out and to get warm but most of the wood is wet. Kenny scrabbles into the dirt at the base of a tree, looking for dry kindling. It's a western hemlock. Isn't it funny the things a man remembers?

Kenny shouts. "I found a beer!" It's a Miller Icehouse. You remember that, too. Then he shouts some more. He has dug up six cans of food. Chili and corn and corned beef hash and okra. But only one beer. You and Kenny convene for a crucial Pacific Crest Trail yo-yo summit conference. Together you decide that half a beer simply will not do, that one of you should drink the entire thing. You flip a nickel and Kenny wins. Has a single beer ever filled anyone with such utter, outsized delight?

It's the spring of 1996 and the left side of your face is missing a functioning salivary gland. You don't have a steady job or health insurance. You don't know if you'll make it back to Mexico this year, or even if you'll make it to the Canadian border. You have no idea about the difficulties and pain that lurk in the decade ahead, about what loss will do to you. It doesn't matter, though. You are blessed, rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams. You have the mountain peaks and the stars and a warm fire and corn and chili and okra and corned beef hash and your tarp and your very good friend drinking a beer, your brother who you have tried to teach about balance and who has taught you so much about joy. You have never been good at beginnings and endings, but that's okay, because beginnings and endings don't really matter here. Maybe there is no beginning, no ending. Maybe-yeah, it's cheesy, it's kind of new agey-life and death are part of the same cycle, and sometimes one death can sustain another life, the cosmic wheel and all that. So maybe the story ends in 1996. Maybe it begins here, too. Maybe all that counts is the journey and you have that. Maybe there is only now, and you have now. You have this moment, underneath the branches of the western hemlock tree, with your hiking partner, who has become your best friend, who has become your brother. You have everything you need. You have everything you will ever need.

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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Scott Williamson

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Get full access to Outside Learn, our online education hub featuring in-depth fitness, nutrition, and adventure courses and more than 2,000 instructional videos when you sign up for Outside+ Sign up for Outside+ today. Campo, CA, Nov.

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We've never written about this essay on our college admissions blog before. But we figured...why not? If one were to ask us what is the most famous college essay ever written, we know the answer hands down. It's this NYU applicant's essay from many, many years ago. To this day, it remains well known in the highly selective college admissions community. But, today, we'd like to discuss it. Look, it's extremely well written. Rarely - and we mean rarely - have we seen students with this kind of writing ability. Did we say rarely yet? Because we do mean rarely. And it's quite funny. The guy can make 30-minute brownies in 20 minutes.

And while it was a great essay at the time and the writer definitely has a sense of humor, we strongly discourage students from writing essays in this style. For one, every single admissions officer - from the ones who are first out of college to the veterans of the departments - will know from where you're taking inspiration. Also, this essay is kind of mocking the entire college admissions process. The writer is essentially saying that he has done all of these amazing things in life and he hasn't even yet gone to college. Sure, it's written tongue in cheek but, at the end of the day, the essay says little about the actual applicant. Because, presumably, little or none of it is true. That's the whole point.

Look, this was a great essay all of those years ago. There's a reason it's a famous essay. What we're saying is don't even think about taking inspiration from it or writing anything stylistically similar because that is not a good idea for you. Here's the essay:

"I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently.

Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing. I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook 30-minute brownies in 20 minutes.

I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello. I was scouted by the Mets. I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire.

I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life, but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven.

I breed prize-winning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But, I have not yet gone to college."

What do you think about this college essay? Let us know your thoughts by posting a Comment below. We look forward to hearing from you! Oh, and if you're a rising high school senior, now is the time when you should be working on your college essays. So contact us today to get started!

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Famous College Essay | Ivy Coach Admissions Blog

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We've never written about this essay on our college admissions blog before. But we figured...why not? If one were to ask us what is the most famous college essay ever written, we know the answer hands down. It's this NYU applicant's essay from many, many years ago.

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Publisher: Dover
Format: Book
Binding: hb
Pages: 120
Released: September 19, 2017
ISBN-13: 9780486818993

Winner of the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation National Book Award, this path-breaking collection of essays is a clarion call to build communities that nurture our spirit. Lorde announces the need for a radical politics of intersectionality while struggling to maintain her own faith as she wages a battle against liver cancer. From reflections on her struggle with the disease to thoughts on lesbian sexuality and African-American identity in a straight white man's world, Lorde's voice remains enduringly relevant in today's political landscape.

Those who practice and encourage social justice activism frequently quote her exhortation, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." In addition to the journal entries of "A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer," this edition includes an interview, "Sadomasochism: Not About Condemnation," and three essays, "I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities," "Apartheid U.S.A.," and "Turning the Beat Around: Lesbian Parenting 1986," as well as a new Foreword by Sonia Sanchez.

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Why We Shouldn't Shield Children From Darkness by Matt de la Peña

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Why We Shouldn't Shield Children From Darkness by Matt de la Peña

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https://time.com/5093669/why-we-shouldnt-shield-children-from-darkness/

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'Why We Shouldn't Shield Children From Darkness'

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Maybe instead of anxiously trying to protect our children from every little hurt, our job is to simply support them through such experiences

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Many terrific informational podcasts out there!

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Many terrific informational podcasts out there!

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Latest Breaking News, U.S. and World Politics, Crime, Business, Science, Technology, Autos, Entertainment, Culture, Movie, Music, Sports.

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The Witness | Pamela Colloff  (Profile of Michelle Lyons, witness to over 278 executions in Huntsville, TX)

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The Witness | Pamela Colloff  (Profile of Michelle Lyons, witness to over 278 executions in Huntsville, TX)

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For more than a decade, Michelle Lyons’s job required her to watch condemned criminals be put to death. After 278 executions, she won’t ever be the same.

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Cheating in America

Did you know that 7 out of 10 students have cheated at least once in the past year? Did you know that 50 percent of those students have cheated more than twice? These shocking statistics are from a survey of 9,000 U.S. high school students.

Incredibly, teachers may even be encouraging their students to cheat! Last year at a school in Detroit, teachers allegedly provided their students with answers to statewide standard tests. Students at the school told investigators that they were promised pizza and money if they cheated on the test as told. Similar allegations at several schools in San Diego county have prompted investigation. A student at a local high school says she sees students cheating on almost every test, and the teachers don't do anything about it.

The kids claim that they're tempted to cheat because of peer pressure and intense competition to get top grades. Many kids also say that their parents are setting a bad example by "fudging" on income taxes, lying about age to pay lower admission prices, or cheating their way out of a speeding ticket. They are sending a message to their kids that it is okay to cheat and lie.

Finding solutions to this problem is difficult. In our school's math classes, each student has different problems on their test papers, so it is useless to look at someone else's answers. Teachers could also randomly mix the problems throughout the page. Another solution is for adults to lower their expectations. Chances are that students believe cheating is the only way to meet unreasonably high expectations. Perhaps it is time for parents and teachers to seriously examine whether higher test results are important enough to encourage cheating.

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Cheating in America Did you know that 7 out of 10 students have cheated at least once in the past year? Did you know that 50 percent of those students have cheated more than twice? These shocking statistics are from a survey of 9,000 U.S. high school students.

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Opinion | Malala: I Survived the Taliban. I Fear for My Afghan Sisters. (Published 2021)

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In the past two decades, millions of Afghan women and girls received an education. Now the future they were promised is in imminent danger.

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She Stalked Her Daughter's Killers Across Mexico, One by One | Azam Ahmed (Profile of Miriam Rodriguez after her daughter's kidnapping and murder)

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She Stalked Her Daughter's Killers Across Mexico, One by One | Azam Ahmed (Profile of Miriam Rodriguez after her daughter's kidnapping and murder)

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She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One (Published 2020)

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Armed with a handgun, a fake ID card and disguises, Miriam Rodríguez was a one-woman detective squad, defying a system where criminal impunity often prevails.

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Mitch Albom: The echo of preventable gunshots at Oxford High School will be heard forever

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Mitch Albom: The echo of preventable gunshots at Oxford High School will be heard forever

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10 Things summer blockbusters teach us about life

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10 Things summer blockbusters teach us about life

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Letter to My Younger Self-Series of letters from famous athletes.

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Letter to My Younger Self-Series of letters from famous athletes.

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Letter to My Younger Self | The Players' Tribune | The Voice of the Game

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The Players' Tribune is a new media company that provides athletes with a platform to connect directly with their fans, in their own words. Founded by Derek Jeter, The Players' Tribune publishes first-person articles from athletes, providing unique insight into the daily sports conversation.

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On having a twin with cerebral palsy and navigating school bullies.

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You didn't think I was going to be *all* doom and gloom, did you?? Last night I picked up a bottle of brandy from the corner wine store, poured it with a splash of eggnog into my Fishs Eddy Turnt tumbler, and settled in for an evening of wrapping gifts and listening to David Sedaris's Santaland Diaries from Holidays on Ice. His hilarious account of working as a department store elf is an absolute classic (shenanigans, obviously, ensue), and I hope you'll love it as much as I do. - Rachel S., Audible Editor

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Check out this great listen on Audible.com. David Sedaris's beloved holiday collection is new again with six more pieces, including a never before published story. Along with such favorites as the diaries of a Macy's elf and the annals of two very competitive families, are Sedaris's tales of tardy...

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Mayfield, Before and After

What was left of a Kentucky town after the tornado?

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What was left of a Kentucky town after the tornado?

When I was a child, I had nightmarish visions of the fire-and-brimstone Hell that I'd heard described by scary preachers determined to save souls. When I learned about the New Madrid geological fault, which was near where I lived, in Mayfield, Kentucky, I added earthquakes to the mix. I imagined this fiery chasm in the field just across the highway, where the sun set. In that field now lies the rubble of the candle factory that was smashed when the maelstrom of tornados spiralled through western Kentucky two weeks before Christmas.

The Mason family farm, where I grew up, is sixteen hundred feet, as the crow flies, from Mayfield Consumer Products, the candle factory where dozens of workers were trapped and nine people died. The storm's death toll in Kentucky as a whole has reached at least seventy-six. I am stunned. When such grief and heartbreak happens so close to home, it is personal. Even though I don't live there now, I'm rooted there. It is the place I know best.

The candle factory wasn't there when I was growing up. But when I was about fourteen, in the mid-fifties, a motel sprang up on the corner where our road met the highway. It was such an exotic place that it replaced my fear of burning brimstone-whatever that was-with dreams of travel and adventure. A girl named Marlene, who was a couple of years older than me, lived at the motel with her parents, and her daddy built her a little frozen-custard stand next to it. To live in a motel and have your own custard stand would be idyllic, I thought.

Eventually, the motel became a shelter for homeless men, and today it is the House of Prayer. The parking lot of the House of Prayer was where the media vans gathered in case there was a dramatic rescue at the candle factory. Cadaver dogs were on duty.

When a long-ago professor of mine learned that the name of my home town was Mayfield, he laughed. "That's absurd," he said. "It's too poetic. A May field. Tra-la-la." He was an English professor and everything had metaphorical meaning for him, I guess. It's ironic that Mayfield will now forever be a symbol of catastrophe.

The tornado travelled more than two hundred miles. It hit Mayfield at about 9:30 P.M. on December 10th. Electricity and water were knocked out, vehicles strewn around the landscape. First-light drone footage of the wreckage showed chaotic scenes of twisted metal and trash and shattered lumber. I couldn't even identify the remnants of the buildings in downtown Mayfield. A friend who had served as a diplomat in Afghanistan told me that the scenes looked even worse than a war zone.

I live far away now, in the center of the state, and I have not yet gone to Mayfield to see the aftermath for myself. The authorities discouraged disaster tourism. "They don't want lookie-loos," my sister LaNelle said. She lives in Paducah, twenty-six miles north of Mayfield, but she told me that she was going to meet our brother Don at the farm. He lives a couple of miles away and had reported some damage to the already deteriorating buildings on the property.

When I imagine the tornado's path, I can't help picturing the area as it was when I lived there. The twister started in Arkansas, to the southwest, travelled to the candle factory, and then ripped along U.S. Highway 45, the same route we always took into town. The feed mill where my father and my grandfather did all the farm business was less than a mile along the way. The railroad track, which once ran from New Orleans to Chicago, lies parallel to the highway. In 1896, a set of quintuplets was born near the feed mill. The quints were such a phenomenon that every train stopped there so that passengers could see them. I once wrote a novel inspired by the tragedy of those babies. They were part of my world, my landscape, my history.

Next, the tornado crossed what we always called the "overhead bridge," which passed between what used to be the Black neighborhood and Dunbar-the former Black school.

The tornado then slammed into the courthouse, toppling the clock tower and leaving a cylindrical hole in the building and piles of bricks. Those bricks were the walls of the courtroom, which had glorious wooden fixtures. When I researched my family history for a memoir, I paged through the old county-clerk books and found accounts of births, marriages, and deaths, with surprise tidbits that fired my imagination.

The county jail, next to the courthouse and partially underground, was hit, too. Some of the prisoners had been on work release back at the candle factory.

You know this kind of town-picturesque, with classic Victorian architecture and a central square. You know it from movies and old radio shows or sitcoms, or from the Thornton Wilder play "Our Town." The town is neat and symmetrical. The streets are on a grid, with the courthouse at the center and the high school straight down a tree-lined boulevard.

At one time, the "court square," as it is called, was home to all the basic little stores that the community relied on. The wallpaper-and-paint store sold books and school supplies. The jewelry store had a clock on the sidewalk permanently set to the hour when Abraham Lincoln died. There was the Rhodes-Burford furniture store, Lookofsky's sporting goods, the Vanity Shop. In the tornado footage, the Hall Hotel is the "tall" building (four or five stories) still standing in a sea of rubble. For years, my uncle was Santa Claus in the little red house that appeared every December in the courthouse yard.

Farmers came to town on Saturdays to swap stuff and to socialize. My grandmother always dressed up when she went to town, in a hat and a presentable dress, not a work dress. Going to town meant ice cream at the soda fountain, greasy hamburgers, Coca-Colas. The two theatres, the Legion and the Princess, were near the square. People always said that they were "going to the show." As long as I lived there, I never heard anyone call it "the movies."

The tornado made me recall my days as a soda jerk at the Rexall's, across from the courthouse. The drugstore was the happening place in the fifties. I worked school nights, five to eight-thirty, for fifty cents an hour, fixing grilled-cheese, chicken-salad, tuna-fish, and pimento-cheese sandwiches. I made milkshakes, banana splits, and sundaes. I didn't have a custard stand of my own, but the social life at the drugstore-boys, flirting-was almost a compensation. The most interesting customers, though, were the eccentrics and the drugstore cowboys who hung out and shot the breeze. I remember Colonel Millsap, a well-known local figure who always dressed in a military uniform of one sort or another. In the afternoons, his job was to pick up the national-news headlines, which the local radio station printed on a yellow telegram-style sheet of paper, and deliver them to local businesses. At each business, he would stop to describe the dangerous missions he had been on that day. He had just flown in from Berlin. Or Paris.

A guy known as Hi Ki always brought his own banana-split dish to the soda fountain. That was stranger then than it would seem today. But my favorite local character was Lon Carter Barton. He was a popular Mayfield High School history teacher who kept in touch with many of his students for decades after graduation. He was an esteemed local historian and storyteller, avowedly provincial. Lon Carter, as we often called him, lived in the second-oldest house in town, with twin maples in front. He knew everyone in town and everything that had happened in Graves County during the Civil War, like the time General Grant passed through Mayfield and down what is now U.S. 45 on his way to the bloody Battle of Shiloh. Every year, Lon shepherded a group of seniors to the battlefield there. His favorite movie was "Gone with the Wind." He must have seen it dozens of times.

For all his restraint, Lon nevertheless courted the outrageous. I believe he was the only person in the county to own one of those fifties hardtop convertibles, a Ford Skyliner. It was a spectacle when the top went up or down. On one occasion, a hypnotist came to perform in town and somehow Lon Carter was on the welcoming committee. Not only did he agree to drive this man around the court square in his Ford convertible, he was persuaded to do this blindfolded and while letting the top down. Mid-spectacle, halfway through the ride, the top got stuck. That evening, I found myself on the stage at the theatre, volunteering to be hypnotized. (I was eager, being an avid reader of " The Search for Bridey Murphy.") The hypnotist was supposed to put me into a trance. When he failed to do so, he whispered to me to pretend.

Lon Carter Barton, who was for a time the Democratic state representative from the district, once told me what had happened before dawn on the morning that the high school was integrated, in the mid-fifties. He said effigies were hung from the trees in front of the school. The authorities immediately removed them and hushed up the incident, he claimed. Lon Carter introduced me to people like Jenny Wilson, whose parents had been enslaved. (She was the youngest of their children, born late in their lives, she told me.) Another Wilson from town, Ellis, left Mayfield to go to art school, and became an important painter of the Harlem Renaissance. But he was not celebrated in western Kentucky in his lifetime. In the eighties, one of his paintings, "Funeral Procession," became familiar to America from its position on the wall of the Huxtables' living room, on "The Cosby Show."

The movie adaptation of my novel " In Country " was filmed in Mayfield, in 1988, and some scenes took place with the courthouse in view. Many local people participated, and the Hollywood presence was a sensation. The director, Norman Jewison, said at the time that he had to film it in Mayfield, because it was the only place where he could find the people in my story. After the tornado, Rebecca Reynolds, a writer friend of mine who had a small role in the movie, noted on Facebook that the film "may now be the only way to see what our town used to look like." When I read her comment, I started to cry.

I moved away from Mayfield when I was eighteen, for school and adventure, but I always came back at least twice a year. The family farm, a mile from town, was my anchor. Each time, I returned with a new perspective. I was sensitive to how Mayfield had changed, and of course I changed, too, so I was always seeing it anew.

Mayfield (and the farm culture I grew up in) has been my resource for fiction for many years. I have tried to record what I hear as poetry in the sound of the speech of western Kentucky, an agricultural region that radically shifted to industrialization. In one short story, I describe a truck driver, Leroy, looking at the courthouse square of his fictional town: "The farmers who used to gather around the courthouse square on Saturday afternoons to play checkers and spit tobacco juice have gone. It has been years since Leroy has thought about the farmers, and they have disappeared without his noticing."

Now the place itself seems gone.

When LaNelle went to Mayfield to check on the farm, she also wanted to see the Ice House Gallery, where she has sometimes exhibited her paintings. The Ice House, a compact brick building, dates back almost a century. I remember home delivery of blocks of ice in the forties. She e-mailed me that evening:

Driving to Mayfield from the north you don't notice anything unusual. . . . If you remember, the street goes up a hill and a bridge. Once I topped the hill the devastation was as far as you could see. . . . The Ice House has walls but no roof. Debris is everywhere. Didn't Mose and Claudine have a two-story red brick on that street? Before they moved to the yellow house on West Broadway? I didn't see it.

At the farm, she found that our prized ancient oak, its roots repeatedly damaged as the road was widened, had succumbed. She saw probably a dozen fallen trees on the property. "Most of them are rotten," she wrote. "The big tree was hollow. . . . The barn collapsed. The corn crib is in a pile."

The house was already in disrepair. It was originally my grandparents' house, and my parents and I lived with them until I was four, when my parents built a little house in the woods. That house was torn down, about twenty-five years ago. "The damage is overwhelming," LaNelle wrote. "The house lost a section of roofing. The deck collapsed. Sections of siding are gone."

On her way back to Paducah, she drove past the candle factory. "Nothing there except scrap metal," she wrote. "It's hard for me to find words for what I'm feeling. Just empty."

The wall of what was the Rexall's where I worked has a mural now that reads "Mayfield. More Than a Memory." If Mayfield is more than a memory, what is it?

There won't be much of a Christmas in Mayfield this year for a lot of people who have lost their homes, their livelihoods, their family members, their pets. The candle-factory workers don't have jobs. They're angry and worried. Many people have been relocated to unfamiliar places for the holidays, and perhaps indefinitely. It will take a long time for them to settle into new jobs, new homes, new lives.

But a spirit of generosity and kindness prevails. Within hours of the disaster, help began flowing in. People all over the country packed their vehicles with supplies and headed for Mayfield. The fairgrounds, where I used to go to the harness races with my granddaddy, filled up with supplies. Pallets of water. Pet food. Bedding. The pavilions were stocked with clothes, toiletries, food, and medicine. Corporations sent food trailers.

John Calipari, the coach of the University of Kentucky's basketball team, got the nonprofit Samaritan's Feet to donate ten thousand pairs of shoes, and he led a telethon effort that so far has raised more than four million dollars.

"A young man came up from Nashville with a large grill and started cooking for people," LaNelle texted me. "Not a cook, doesn't have a restaurant, wanted to help."

In my family, we are not going to do Christmas the usual way. "I'm too sad," LaNelle said. She will be taking toys to kids in Mayfield. Don and his wife will be helping distribute dinners to people sheltering in the hotels.

I can't shake the images of the candle-factory workers trapped under concrete slabs; of the gaping hollow where the clock tower once was; of the terror of the nursing-home patients, who huddled under blankets at the nurses' station and survived; of my cousin's house, twirling a hundred and eighty degrees, the foundation a lazy Susan; of the mighty oak tree, down; of the lost, bewildered animals.

But, in a photo my sister sent me, there is the pear tree beside our house, intact. In late October, it was loaded with beautiful pears. I brought full bags home with me.

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What was left of a Kentucky town after the tornado? When I was a child, I had nightmarish visions of the fire-and-brimstone Hell that I'd heard described by scary preachers determined to save souls. When I learned about the New Madrid geological fault, which was near where I lived, in Mayfield, Kentucky, I added earthquakes to the mix.

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This wild and hilarious obituary came across my social media feed yesterday.

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Renay Mandel Corren

El Paso, TX-A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday.

Of itself hardly news, or good news if you're the type that subscribes to the notion that anybody not named you dying in El Paso, Texas is good news. In which case have I got news for you: the bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling Jewish-Mexican-Redneck American family has kicked it. This was not good news to Renay Mandel Corren's many surviving children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of whom she even knew and, in her own way, loved. There will be much mourning in the many glamorous locales she went bankrupt in: McKeesport, PA, Renay's birthplace and where she first fell in love with ham, and atheism; Fayetteville and Kill Devil Hills, NC, where Renay's dreams, credit rating and marriage are all buried; and of course Miami, FL, where Renay's parents, uncles, aunts, and eternal hopes of all Miami Dolphins fans everywhere, are all buried pretty deep. Renay was preceded in death by Don Shula.

Because she was my mother, the death of zaftig good-time gal Renay Corren at the impossible old age of 84 is newsworthy to me, and I treat it with the same respect and reverence she had for, well, nothing. A more disrespectful, trash-reading, talking and watching woman in NC, FL or TX was not to be found. Hers was an itinerant, much-lived life, a Yankee Florida liberal Jewish Tough Gal who bowled 'em in Japan, rolled 'em in North Carolina and was a singularly unique parent. Often frustrated by the stifling, conservative culture of the South, Renay turned her voracious mind to the home front, becoming a model stay at home parent, a supermom, really, just the perfect PTA lady, volunteer, amateur baker and-AHHAHAA HA! HA! HA! Just kidding, y'all! Renay - Rosie to her friends, and this was a broad who never met a stranger - worked double shifts with Doreen, ate a ton of carbs with Bernie, and could occasionally be stirred to stew some stuffed cabbage for the kids. She played cards like a shark, bowled and played cribbage like a pro, and laughed with the boys until the wee hours, long after the last pin dropped. At one point in the 1980's, Renay was the 11th or 12th-ranked woman in cribbage in America, and while that could be a lie, it sounds great in print. She also told us she came up with the name for Sunoco, and I choose to believe this, too. Yes, Renay lied a lot. But on the plus side, Renay didn't cook, she didn't clean, and she was lousy with money, too. Here's what Renay was great at: dyeing her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying dirty magazines. She said she read them for the articles, but filthy free speech was really Renay's thing. Hers was a bawdy, rowdy life lived large, broke and loud. We thought Renay could not be killed. God knows, people tried. A lot. Renay has been toying with death for a decades, but always beating it and running off in her silver Chevy Nova. Covid couldn't kill Renay. Neither could pneumonia twice, infections, blood clots, bad feet, breast cancer twice, two mastectomies, two recessions, multiple bankruptcies, marriage to a philandering Sergeant Major, divorce in the 70's, six kids, one cesarean, a few abortions from the Quietly Famous Abortionist of Spring Lake, NC or an affair with Larry King in the 60's. Renay was preceded in death by her ex-boyfriend, Larry King. Renay was also sadly preceded in death by her beloved daughter, Cathy Sue Corren Lester Trammel Webster, of Kill Devil Hills, NC, who herself was preceded in death by two marriages, a fudge shop and one eyeball lost in a near-fatal Pepsi bottle incident that will absolutely be explored in future obituaries. Losing her 1-eyed badass b**** of a daughter in 2007 devastated Renay, but it also made her quite homeless, since Cathy pretty much picked up the tab. A talented and gregarious grifter, Renay M. Corren eked out her final years of luxury (she literally retired at 62) under the care, compassion, checking accounts and, evidently, unlimited patience of her favorite son and daughter-in-law, Michael and Lourdes Corren, of world-famous cow sanctuary El Paso, TX. Renay is also survived by her son Jeffrey Corren and his endlessly tolerant wife Shirley, of Powell's Point, NC; Scott Corren, and what's left of his colon, of Hampton, VA; Marc and Laura Corren, the loveliest dirt farmers of Vernon, TX (seriously, where is that); and her favorite son, the gay one who writes catty obituaries in his spare time, Andy Corren, of - obviously - New York City. Plus two beloved granddogs, Mia and Hudson. Renay was particularly close to and grateful for the lavish attentions of her grandaughter Perla and her great-grandchildren Elijah and Leroy, as well as her constant cruise companions Sam Trammell of Greenville, NC, and Adam Corren of El Paso, TX. Renay took tremendous pride in making 1 gay son and 2 gay grandchildren, Sam Trammell and Adam Corren.

There will be a very disrespectful and totally non-denominational memorial on May 10, 2022, most likely at a bowling alley in Fayetteville, NC. The family requests absolutely zero privacy or propriety, none what so ever, and in fact encourages you to spend some government money today on a 1-armed bandit, at the blackjack table or on a cheap cruise to find our inheritance. She spent it all, folks. She left me nothing but these lousy memories. Which I, and my family of 5 brothers and my sister-in-laws, nephews, friends, nieces, neighbors, ex-boyfriends, Larry King's children, who I guess I might be one of, the total strangers who all, to a person, loved and will cherish her. Forever. Please think of the brightly-frocked, frivolous, funny and smart Jewish redhead who is about to grift you, tell you a filthy joke, and for Larry King's sake: LAUGH. Bye, Mommy. We loved you to bits.

RIP RENAY MANDEL CORREN 10 MAY 1937 - 11 DEC 2021

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Obituaries in Fayetteville, NC | Fayetteville Observer

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Renay Mandel Corren El Paso, TX-A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday. Of itself hardly news, or good news if you're the type that subscribes to the notion that anybody not named you dying in El Paso, Texas is good news.

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This one reminded me of the "Books Are Dangerous" one...

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This one reminded me of the "Books Are Dangerous" one...

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Editor's Note: Anna Akbari, Ph.D., is a sociologist and serial entrepreneur. She has taught at New York University and the New School for Social Research, and her research areas include technology/human relationships and happiness. She is the founder of Closet Catharsis, an image consulting company, and Sociology of Style. Follow her on Twitter.

Story highlights

I am an underdog in life. From the moment I entered the world, I was handed a collection of circumstances that most first world people would label as "disadvantages."

I grew up in a poor, single parent family. My dark features and Middle Eastern last name further complicated my Midwestern upbringing. I didn't look like anyone else (including my mother). Racism, economic hardship, and familial struggles were my everyday reality from the beginning.

But I am not the only underdog out there. Maybe you or someone close to you also has underdog status. Our individual stories are likely different, but the biographical details matter far less than the significant and perhaps surprisingly positive traits those obstacles have the power to nurture.

Ask someone who they are and how they got there, and many will begin by describing the hurdles they've encountered - the repeated rejection, the failed pursuits, the periods of scrimping.

So much of how we understand ourselves is shaped by our losses and hardships, even more so than our victories.

But as uncomfortable as they are, these personal roadblocks make us stronger and better than our more privileged selves.

In Malcolm Gladwell's new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, he argues that being the underdog and experiencing disadvantages breeds "desirable difficulties."

But how much of what's "desirable" is about perspective? Challenges don't improve us merely because they exist. We have to reflect on them and proactively adapt their lessons into our life and work habits.

The immense potential of these desirable difficulties is especially salient in the workplace.

If you've never had a safety net, then you never feel like you have much to lose.

Anna Akbari

Read more: How 5 of world's leading executives streamline their productivity

Here's why underdogs win in the workplace:

1. We're less likely to take things (and people) for granted.

Once you've felt the pangs of struggle, you don't easily forget it, particularly if it's experienced early in life. At work, this means underdogs are more likely to notice the little things and demonstrate appreciation.

Gratitude makes people happier, and since happiness is contagious, it also positively affects your coworkers. That doesn't mean we're all 24/7 bundles of cheer, but when you grow up without and have a desire for something better, you develop an inherent optimism and immunity to complacency.

2. We have rich imaginations.

Learning to do without demands creativity. Underdogs are well-versed in the art of improvisation; it's necessary for our survival.

We're scrappy. Last minute changes to a presentation? An accelerated deadline? If all other qualifications are relatively equal, I'll choose the underdog to work on my team every time.

Underdogs spend their lives imagining "more," which is invaluable in business. Everyday improvisation leads to large-scale innovation, which transforms how we work and what we collectively produce.

Read more: Deadly sins needn't always be fatal for your career

3. We are hyper-actively observant.

When you're an outsider, you vigilantly pay attention to what it takes to "fit in." Details and differences are not lost on underdogs. We quickly size up a situation and analyze how to optimize it.

Obliviousness is difficult to correct, and underdogs are aware by necessity - a sort of "mindful compensation."

Being an underdog doesn't mean you're a fraud when you do manage to find your way into more fortunate circles, but it does mean you had to become intimately familiar with the nuances of the rules to get there. This makes underdogs competitive players to watch (and hire).

If there's one thing I know how to do, it's hustle

Anna Akbari

4. We are not risk averse.

If you've never had a safety net, then you feel like you don't have much to lose.

That doesn't mean underdogs are inherently reckless, but it does bode well for taking calculated risks.

Being an entrepreneur, for instance, means you are likely to "fail" at some point - but it also means you could score big eventually. And it's not about luck (though many will flippantly dismiss it as such), but rather perseverance, resilience, tenacity, and general strength of character that leads us to succeed.

Underdogs don't take no for an answer and, perhaps counter-intuitively, tend to be very confident (while arguably less arrogant) - because without that unbridled confidence, we would still be stuck in our previous reality.

It takes a pretty serious belief in yourself to rise above those circumstances.

Read more: What football managers can teach you about leadership

5. We are very hungry.

If there's one thing I know how to do, it's hustle. With underdogs, the default answer is "yes." Yes, I can learn how to do that. Yes, I can make that happen. Yes, that is possible.

Will this can-do attitude backfire? Possibly, sometimes. But more often than not, that inner drive and hunger to excel means we're willing to acquire new skills, push ourselves out of our comfort zone (what comfort zone?), and work toward goals with laser-sharp focus.

Being an underdog in life has shaped my character and my career, making me more successful and, ultimately, happier.

But while being an underdog can make you pretty bad-ass in the workplace, let us not glamorize hardship.

Being an underdog in life has shaped my character and my career, making me more successful

Anna Akbari

Because make no mistake: It's difficult. Most of us wouldn't want to repeat the past, and we diligently strive for a better future with fewer difficulties for our offspring.

And yet, I for one would not change the personal challenges I've been dealt.

Underdog status is what you make of it. It's not a label I'm looking to overcome. It's a permanent state of being for me.

It reminds me everyday what it took to get where I am, how much I have to be grateful for, and how much room I still have to grow.

Being an underdog isn't a plea for sympathy. It's an invitation to triumph.

Read more: Women value ethics more than men

Read more: Are we ready for GenY leaders?

Read more: Five ways to quit in style

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Five reasons underdogs win in the workplace | CNN Business

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Editor's Note: Anna Akbari, Ph.D., is a sociologist and serial entrepreneur. She has taught at New York University and the New School for Social Research, and her research areas include technology/human relationships and happiness. She is the founder of Closet Catharsis, an image consulting company, and Sociology of Style.

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When I saw the news on Facebook, I gasped. The Varsity in my hometown of Athens, Georgia, was closing. I texted my family group chat immediately: "Someone please tell me this isn't true." My dad responded first: "My heart is heavy. Athens will never be the same." On Sunday, after nearly ninety years in business, the beloved one-time drive-in closed its doors, pulling down the rooftop flags and iconic Scrabble-board sign in preparation for demolition this summer.

I've been eating at Athens's Varsity since before I was tall enough to peek my head over the counter to see the cashier calling, "What'll ya have?" We'd go when Mom was out of town and Dad was in charge of planning dinner; after church league basketball games; for nearly every single one of my birthday dinners. The fluorescent lights illuminating the linoleum floors and bright red booths fill my childhood memories, as do the smell of the fryer making fries and hand pies and the muffled sounds of the Jetsons or Tom and Jerry playing on the overhead TV in the cartoon room (my preferred seating locale if my brother wasn't around to vote for the room next door that aired ESPN.) I remember the ancient drinking fountains spewing icy cold water sourced from a secret compartment holding a block of slowly sweating ice; the larger-than-life map of town where you could point out school, and church, and our house, if you just knew where to look; the other patrons you'd wave to, whether you knew them or not.

It's true that after a year in which millions of people died from a virus that made us feel as though the world were crumbling around us at every turn, this loss isn't that momentous. It's just one of the countless restaurants that fell prey to the economy's upheavals. And when I get a hankering for some greasy onion rings or a P.C.-chocolate milk poured straight from the carton into a paper cup filled nearly to the brim with pellet ice-I can brave the traffic on I-85 into the thick of downtown Atlanta to stop by the original Atlanta Varsity location or swing through terminal C during the inevitable Hartsfield-Jackson layover. The restaurant's social media pages hint that they might build a new location in Athens, soon, as well.

But still, I-and most of my fellow Athenians or anyone who's spent four (or more) years carousing the University of Georgia's campus-am mourning for the wide, sunny, magnolia-lined lot on the corner of West Broad Street and Milledge Avenue. In 1932, four years after the original Varsity location opened in Atlanta, the Gordy family set up shop in Athens across from UGA's iconic arch. In 1962, the current iteration opened, serving the town from two spots for a decade and a half before the downtown shop shuttered.

It's in these places that my adoration for this restaurant began before I was even born. My grandparents went on dates at the Atlanta drive-in in the early fifties when my grandmother was in high school and my grandpa had just returned from the Korean War, but they switched their allegiance easily to the Athens location when they moved there as newlyweds. When I was in high school, they'd take me there on dates. We'd sit in a booth by the front door-my grandfather couldn't hear me over the quiet purr of the televisions in the side rooms-and catch up on the goings-on in my life and theirs. They would order together: one chili dog, for Papa; one slaw dog, for Nana; and a chili slaw dog they'd split down the middle. Years later, after my grandpa's funeral, the Varsity was the first place I wanted to go.

My dad claims to have been the last to-go order at the downtown location on the day it closed in 1978. (He has kept that box and cup in our basement for years beside high school yearbooks and 1996 Olympic memorabilia.) Behind him in line, UGA dean William Tate pulled out a cassette recorder and played "Auld Lang Syne" as he ordered the very last chili dog eaten in the building.

I went home a few weeks ago for my brother's wedding. Before the weekend's festivities began, my dad and I set out for the Varsity one last time. The restaurant already announced it would be closing, but even the employees weren't sure when. The dining room never reopened after COVID, so we pulled through the drive-thru, ordered our usuals-wedding diet be damned-and sat out front on a picnic table in the softening summer light. As we slurped down our P.C.s and inhaled too many chili dogs, we talked about the upcoming wedding, about the future and our growing family. I glanced through the windows into the half-dark building. Someday soon, they'll rebuild somewhere else in Athens, and we'll frequent that spot just as loyally as we did this one. Maybe one day my children will sit in a red booth and listen to my dad tell stories about when he was dating my mom, as cartoons from my childhood drone in the background.

Like he knew what I was thinking, my dad raised his red paper cup to me in salutation and nodded. One last P.C. for auld lang syne.

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A Love Letter to the Varsity in Athens, Georgia

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When I saw the news on Facebook, I gasped. The Varsity in my hometown of Athens, Georgia, was closing. I texted my family group chat immediately: "Someone please tell me this isn't true." My dad responded first: "My heart is heavy. Athens will never be the same."

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Disney often codes their villains as queer: This is widely known and accepted. First noticed by scholars during the Disney Renaissance of the late '80s through the '90s, critical observations about characters like Scar ( The Lion King ) have since disseminated into pithy, viral tweets and TikToks. A quick Google search of "gay Disney villains" will turn up dozens of articles, all repeating the same litany of facts: That The Little Mermaid 's Ursula is based on the iconic drag queen Divine, that Hollywood often uses British accents and effeminate mannerisms in men like 's King John to signal moral decrepitude.

But those are observations without analysis, which is to say: pointing out the obvious without asking or . The subtext of these clickbait articles and listicles is often: Disney codes villains as queer because Disney thinks being gay is bad . Which is one way to read it.

However, simply saying "Disney is bigoted" has never sat entirely well with me for one reason: In spite of what the Supreme Court of the United States may rule, Disney is not a person. Disney is a corporation that wields the power of a nation-state, and, consequently, has one central obsession - the preservation and expansion of that power, a theme that is prevalent and evident in every story they allow their employees and contractors to tell.

If queerness is consistently coded a certain way, it has something to do with how Disney wants power to function - who can wield it, and how.

Millennials are the generation whose childhoods were shaped by the stories of the Disney Renaissance, a period generally considered to have begun with 1989's The Little Mermaid and concluded with 1999's . It includes favorites like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast , and - which, incidentally, are at the heart of the corporation's "live-action" remake strategy, intended to further monetize a now-grown generation's nostalgia for the stories that formed us, stories we can share with our own children (or group texts).

The Disney Renaissance was birthed after a decade of HIV/AIDS ravaging queer communities; its height marked by political milestones such as President Clinton's signing of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) and the institution of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" for LGBTQ+ members of the military. Divergent, non-normative sexuality was purportedly a threat to society, and Disney, ever the quiet institutional soldier, answered by providing a veritable stable of queer-coded villains who were ill-suited to lead or assume power.

has one of the top-five highest-grossing Disney soundtracks of all time, but that's generally where any lingering nostalgia dies. To say that the film itself is problematic is an understatement. While the screenshot of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas' father, saying Pocahontas "these white men are dangerous" has found a rich afterlife on social media, the film's historical inaccuracy and deliberate whitewashing of colonization and its aftermath have cycled it out of many a millennial's "comfort film" rotation, something that has generally gone unaddressed by the corporation. (The fact that Mel Gibson voiced John Smith hasn't helped, either.)

Pocahontas may seem like a strange vehicle for discussing queer villainy. But that's the thing: Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people's historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities, and what better way to do that than to displace the heart of the film's conflict onto contemporary cultural anxiety: queerness and its incumbent specter, masculinity.

Divergent, non-normative sexuality was purportedly a threat to society, and Disney, ever the quiet institutional soldier, answered by providing a veritable stable of queer-coded villains who were ill-suited to lead or assume power.

Governor Ratcliffe is not set up as the villain because he is a colonizer, or even because he is in charge of the mission to invade the Powhatan nation - or, as Disney has framed it, dig for gold. To criticize him for these positions would implicate and damage the purported "heroism" of every other white character on screen.

The narrative works to align the audience's viewpoint with that of the other colonizers: in the words of one of the laborers, "Look at us! No gold, no food, while Ratcliffe sits in his tent all day, happy as a clam." The audience is clearly meant to sympathize with the worker instead of Ratcliffe, the villainous manager, even if that worker is also occupying stolen land and explicitly fantasizing about killing Indigenous people. (What "audience," exactly, is this for? You already know the answer.)

However, it isn't just that Ratcliffe is a bullying, well-dressed boss in an environment where no one is impressed by designer wares. He's deeply insecure and concerned about what other people think, as opposed to the naturally popular, carefree everyman that is the Captain of the ship (and Pocahontas' eventual love interest) John Smith. In fact, we learn that this mission is something of a last-ditch effort to salvage Ratcliffe's reputation with the king. For him, success means falling in line, trying to do right by the crown, to reap the reward. When he says "it's not that I'm bitter," we understand that he is, in fact, deeply bitter.

Ratcliffe's real fantasy is power - bringing his enemies at court to heel, being so celebrated that "My dear friend King Jimmy will probably build me a shrine" - precisely because he feels so ironically powerless.

This is not the kind of chaotic, burn-it-all-down villain who has been canonized by drag shows.

He isn't as easy to pin down as the Queer Villains of Excess: the Scars and Ursulas who you can spot by their muchness, their refusal to conform to rigid social structures, their wild desire to usurp the throne. Excess is the singular quality that usually drives queer-coded villains to crave power at all costs, their appetites monstrous and unnatural.

Ironically, even the most chaotic queer-coded villains are rarely bent on creating their own power structures - they only ever desire the kingdom and, seemingly, the lives of their straight-coded, heroic counterparts. Jafar wants to be sultan, but has no conception of what to with that power once obtained, to the point he cannot strategize enough to realize that the genie is beholden to others. Scar believes himself to be the rightful ruler of the Pride Lands, only to drive the kingdom into a barren wasteland: The queer failure of reproduction, on which society so purportedly rests, made manifest. "Fuck the social order and the child in whose name we're collectively terrorized," queer theorist Lee Edelman writes in - the anthem of Disney villains everywhere.

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people's historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities, and what better way to do that than to displace the heart of the film's conflict onto contemporary cultural anxiety: queerness and its incumbent specter, masculinity.

The opposite of excess is moderation, and restraining oneself to fit into the boxes society has prescribed - well, this is assimilation.

Assimilation is when a group of people assumes the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group - when something core and essential to one's culture and sense of self and identity is lost in the interest of resembling the social majority. In the U.S., this has had many iterations around the suppression of non-English languages, the forced Christianization of Indigenous peoples, and more. For the LGBTQ+ community, it looks like our communities having been largely underground until the last 50 or so years, because social legibility meant imprisonment, exile, or death

In many ways, for many people, various forms of assimilation are pure survival in a white, heteronormative, and otherwise profoundly difficult world. But assimilation used against one's own community, assimilation used to turn the target off your own back and toward communities with less cultural power than yours, becomes an alliance with the oppressor.

There is a queer anxiety to Ratcliffe, because he knows his attempts to fit in are pretense. This is, as he says himself, "my last chance for glory." Does he exile himself from the crew of colonizers because he thinks he's better than them, or because he thinks they'll see through him? Or both? Captain John Smith can have a beer with the guys. Ratcliffe, not so much.

John Smith has swagger - and a reputation that precedes him. "You can't fight Indians without John Smith!" one of the colonizers declares in his introductory scene, as Smith literally rides a cannon onto the ship. Depicted as a natural leader, he's respected by his men for his physical prowess and bravery that borders on stupidity. Smith has a martyr-like willingness to put himself in harm's way for his men that, while not explicitly labeled as Christian, is certainly coded as such. "You'd do the same for me," Smith says jokingly to his companions, after leaping into the ocean during a storm to save a man who fell overboard. He is, in essence, exactly the kind of leading man that Mel Gibson, the actor who voices him, spent a career playing - the mythic American cowboy and ideal leading man of Hollywood cinema. (Complete with the domestic abuse and antisemitism bona fides.)

Queer-coded Ratcliffe is trying to earn a place in the system by being its most traditional guardian, but he also represents a kind of masculinity that has long since gone indoors to the Royal Court, concerned with accumulation through relationship and intellect. Americans recognize this as the masculinity of the educated, high-born (or aspirational) cultural aesthete, anxieties about which would soon manifest in the late '90s and early '00s under the term "metrosexual." John Smith, conversely, represents the rugged, individualist masculinity that defines itself not by social status but by a cowboy mentality, by connection with God, family, and the land.

In many ways, Pocahontas is structured like a Western, and John Smith may as well be John Wayne. John Smith saves the man who fell overboard; Ratcliffe is the government lackey in a suit who hunkers down in his cabin and only emerges once the danger has passed, clutching his pug while his manservant shields him with an umbrella. Government intervention is often a primary conflict in Westerns, resented by white colonizers played by actors like Wayne, who have gone west and figured out a way to live (with varying levels of hostility to the local Indigenous community) outside of federal oversight. The men in suits have effeminate mannerisms, a lot of education, and virtually no physical strength (coded as natural, God-given virility), with very little idea on how to practically connect to the world around them. Set aside for a moment the well-documented historical phenomenon of white, Black, and Latino gay cowboys throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and apply the genre of American Westerns and their ideology of masculinity, expansion, and, consequently, who gets to have what in Pocahontas .

What the colonizers want, respectively, in Pocahontas ? (Obvious question, but stay with me.) In Ratcliffe's villain anthem, "Mine, Mine, Mine" - which is, and I cannot stress this enough, a duet with John Smith - Ratcliffe is singing about the gold allowing him to accumulate wealth and reputation and status, delegating the digging to the crew. Smith is the one actually singing about the while climbing trees and waterfalls, activities which seem unnecessarily strenuous. But don't they want the same thing: to take whatever land they land on in the interest of colonial expansion? Haven't Smith and Ratcliffe already been shown to be very much on the same page about the murder and displacement of Indigenous peoples? But Disney's edit would have you think otherwise.

John Smith has swagger - and a reputation that precedes him. "You can't fight Indians without John Smith!" one of the colonizers declares in his introductory scene, as Smith literally rides a cannon onto the ship.

"You shot him!" one accuses. "Smith was right all along!" another cries hypocritically, as all of them had been worked up in a racist war song ("Savages"), fantasizing about genocide only the night before. The white colonizers mutiny in favor of the preferred masculine archetype: The Cowboy. Ratcliffe is tied up, gagged, and set to be tried upon return to England.

It is deeply satisfying to see the avowedly racist Ratcliffe in chains. But is the colonizing and racist rhetoric what he's being punished for? No. The other colonizers are still walking free, many of them staying behind to continue to build up their Jamestown settlement.

How tenuous the conditions of acceptance for white gays doing the bidding of white supremacy.

Ratcliffe is, simply put, a Corporate Gay, a Log Cabin Republican, a Cyrus Bean, the Disney equivalent of (allegedly) that one senator from South Carolina. Ratcliffe has bought into the idea that serving the system will benefit him, and that if only he does its bidding, things will ultimately work out. But queerness renders you automatically suspect within any system of power, even white supremacy. What Ratcliffe, and other white gays like him, fail to realize is that assimilation is not acceptance; it is merely borrowed time.

There is no queer revolution amongst Disney villains, see. There is no abolition, no truly radical liberation within the fairy tales that ultimately serve to codify what "happily ever after" means, and for who. In Disney, queerness is only ever an imitation of the hetero original, never a full expression of itself. Gay villains are depicted as the dog who caught the car: Once they get it, what do they even do?

* * *

Jeanna Kadlec is a culture writer living in NYC. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, O the Oprah Magazine, LitHub, NYLON, Allure, and more.

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Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas - Longreads

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Disney often codes their villains as queer: This is widely known and accepted. First noticed by scholars during the Disney Renaissance of the late '80s through the '90s, critical observations about characters like Scar ( The Lion King ) have since disseminated into pithy, viral tweets and TikToks.

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The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet-from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu-on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene 's reviews have been praised as "observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy." John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection that includes both beloved essays and all-new pieces exclusive to the book.

Out now!

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The Anthropocene Reviewed Book - John Green

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The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet-from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu-on a five-star scale.

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There’s an elephant in the room that I’ve been thinking about a lot over these last few weeks.

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Get full access to Outside Learn, our online education hub featuring in-depth fitness, nutrition, and adventure courses and more than 2,000 instructional videos when you sign up for Outside+ Sign up for Outside+ today.

Campo, CA, Nov. 18, 2004 Yesterday long-distance hiker Scott Williamson, 32, stepped off the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) at California's border with Mexico, completing the first-ever continuous "yo-yo," or round-trip of the 2,560-mile trail that stretches from the Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington. This was Williamson's sixth bid to yo-yo the PCT.

Your father and the man known as Mr. Beer find the deaf girl at a store in town and they learn that she's been chasing you for 700 miles.

When they bring her to your campsite, you don't know it, but that's the moment your grief finally starts to lift. That's when you find what you need, what you have always needed. It's a year ago, May 14, and maybe that's where your story begins.

But starting there leaves out too much. It leaves out the crazy man with the gun and the miracle of the corned beef hash and that sad day on the river when the magic ducks honor the dead boy. It doesn't even mention Hobo Joe and Walking Carrot and The Wall and The Abominable Slow Man and Real Fat. And what about the nightmares? What about the years of failure? What about the autumn of loss, the seasons of mourning?

To understand those things, it's better to begin with the day searchers find a bear feeding on your best friend's body. Or the afternoon you lose the deaf woman. Too grim? It's your story, and it's filled with the strangest and most unexpected gifts, so maybe it's best to begin on the rock in the snowfield where you find her again. But that's too happy. It's misleading. What about in a spot you know all too well, where you have spent way too much time: under sodden skies and sneering peaks during an early winter blizzard, as you sink to your thighs and know that you are-once again-doomed to defeat?

You've always struggled with beginnings and endings. How can anyone expect you to say when you started, when you finished? Might as well ask when you decided to start living.

Still, an epic journey-and if your journey is anything, it's definitely epic-must begin somewhere. The first step, the first time, out of Mexico? That's accurate, but inadequate. The victorious stroll last November into the crowd of photographers and friends? Touching, but incomplete. No, better to begin in the midst of setback, struggling. Better to start with what you know. Better to start with isolation and pain.

It is exactly ten minutes until five in the afternoon-you remember that because the man in the hooded sweatshirt asks you what time it is and you tell him, right before he shoots you in the face. It is 4:50 in the afternoon on January 20, 1996, and you aren't scheduled to work that day but when the convenience store owner calls and asks you to come in you say yes, because you can always use extra cash. You work hard when you work-tree-feller, logger, construction-so you can take off for months at a time, and such an approach to labor and to life has made for many sublime sunrises and peaceful sunsets and occasional moments of Zen oneness with nature and...a job in a convenience store. You are reading an article in The New Yorker when the man in the hooded sweatshirt comes in and asks what time it is and you look at your watch and tell him and then you notice he seems nervous, his eyes are darting, he is rocking back and forth, and then he lifts something and points it at you and you feel heat and searing pain on your cheek.

The bullet enters the left side of your face, clips your jaw, rips through flesh and stops. You run to the back of the store and the door is locked so you hit it with your shoulder. It is a steel door with a deadbolt but you tear it from the wall. The man in the hooded sweatshirt follows and fires six more rounds and you keep running. You keep running and running until you see a man and a woman and their young child lifting groceries out of their car and you tell them you've been shot.

They take you inside and you call 911 and you worry because even with a towel you're dripping blood on their floor.

The doctors give you morphine and they check for nerve damage. They tell you that the salivary gland on the left side of your mouth might never function again. They tell you it's too risky to remove the bullet, which is lodged near your spine, and that another quarter of an inch and you would be paralyzed. You leave the hospital and you have nightmares and get spooked when you see men in hooded sweatshirts and you resolve to change your life.

Some men might bend their will toward jobs with desks and health insurance and 401Ks, away from double shifts at convenience stores. Not you. You decide that life is short, that the future is uncertain. You decide that time is precious. You have already hiked from Mexico to Canada once, a huge summer trek on the Pacific Crest Trail. It was wonderful, but now that you've been shot in the face and reevaluated your life, you want more than wonderful. You decide you will hike from Mexico to Canada again, but this time, rather than celebrating at the border, you will turn around and hike back to Mexico. You will need to travel lighter this time and pack smarter and move very, very fast to beat the winter storms before they make the southbound journey impossible. You will need to hike more than 25 miles a day, every day, for almost 7 months. No one has ever accomplished such a feat before. No one has even tried it. Maybe the moment you make the decision is the best place of all to start.

But even that's not right. No, if you want the best beginning to your story-the real beginning, the right beginning-you need to start with the kid. The first time you see him, he is crouching next to a spring at the bottom of a canyon, feral, like a wild child. It's May 3, 1993, and you have been hiking for a week, on your way to Canada on the PCT, one way, just like any other young man longing to escape life and find himself. The kid is 17 years old, skinny and overpacked and he's in trouble. That's the first thing you notice. His pack must weigh 90 pounds-it's bigger than he is. He carries a gleaming stove, and a fat down sleeping bag. Shiny pots and kettles hang from his pack. Countless straps and bungee cords. He has the newest and heaviest of everything. A kid who must have read some books, who has no idea that the secret to happiness out here is packing light and moving fast. He reminds you of yourself, when you first made the trip the year before. You made it to Oregon, and you suffered, and you learned, so this time you've come stripped down. This time, you carry only 20 pounds.

You're not very nice to him. You don't need extra baggage of any kind on your hike. That's something else you've learned. But he's delighted to be outdoors, delighted to meet you, delighted to learn from you. He's even delighted to learn how little you think of his style. He tags along, and every day he digs a hole and buries a piece of equipment, or a piece of clothing. He wants to do it like you.

You have never met such a person before. Wake at 4 a.m. for a predawn march? No problem. Log 45 miles in one day? Can do. Climb every mountain, ford a gazillion streams? Now, that's living!! You have no idea about the sadness he carries, the sadness he will bequeath to you.

It's funny-you're only 21 and already you have chosen a life of long-distance hikes and labor high up in trees and meticulous, solitary planning and you spend more time alone on the Pacific Crest Trail than probably any person on earth, but every so often a person crashes into your life and even if you're careful, even if you're not very welcoming at first, even if you're not very nice, your plans get all screwed up.

When he leaves the trail to return to his mother's house, you're surprised. Not that he's leaving-even burying so many things, the kid was still carrying too much. You're surprised that you miss him.

Then, one day in early July, at the post office in Sierra City, you see his name in a register: Kenny Gould. He's come back and he is trying to catch you. He doesn't realize he's already ahead of you. Every few days you see his name in another log. The kid is humping 40 miles a day. You cover distances like that every once in a while, but the kid is doing it day after day. No one can keep up that pace.

You didn't make this trip to baby-sit anyone, to save anyone from himself. You didn't start in Mexico in order to make friends. But something happens. It's funny how a man's plans can change, in spite of himself. You start logging monster distances, too. It takes you 2 weeks to catch him. When you find him at Crater Lake, in Oregon, he is carrying next to nothing. He has taken scissors and a knife to his pack, slicing off all the hanging straps. When the kid does something, he's all in. That summer, you're all in, too. You hike together through the rest of Oregon and all of Washington, to Canada. Over campfires and at sunrise and in meadows you talk about the misapplication of technology in the world, how it is serving powerful interests rather than people. He's just a kid and you're barely an adult. You talk about how society is going down the tubes, how neither of you will be sucked into the machine. You talk about the tricky business of living in a troubled world without becoming part of the trouble. He is impulsive, carefree-sometimes to a fault. You help him settle down, think things through. And you are meticulous, painstaking-sometimes to a fault. Hiking with Kenny, you quit planning so much and start living more. Kenny talks about how nothing is impossible. You can't help it. You believe him.

The next summer, while Kenny climbs in Yosemite, you hike the Continental Divide Trail, from Canada to Mexico. The summer after that-Kenny's still climbing, and you hear he's going through some tough times with his family-you travel the Appalachian Trail, but you tack on the Florida Trail first, then walk 450 miles of road between the two. You want to make it from Florida to Maine. Now you have achieved the Triple Crown of long-distance hiking, which is as rare as it sounds. What's next?

The kid has an idea. You run into him that fall at a meeting of long-distance hikers. His folks have split up and he's spent a little time in a psych ward where the doctors told him he's got a mental illness, and he's ashamed about that, but you tell him it's no big deal, they're just words, like "flu" or "virus," that he doesn't have anything to feel bad about. He appreciates that, it makes him feel better. Do you want to hear his idea? You do.

What if next year, Kenny asks, you try something really ambitious? What if next year, you hike the PCT again? But this time, instead of stopping in Canada, what if you turn around and hoof it back to Mexico? And what if he tags along? You promise to think about it. And then the man in the hood walks into the convenience store and you decide life is short and a man can spend too much time thinking and you decide that you and Kenny will embark on a great adventure.

You lug your sewing machine up from Richmond to Kenny's mom's house in the Sierra foothills, in Auburn, California. One night she looks in and sees you and Kenny, both longhaired and bearded and plotting, each one of you hunched over a sewing machine. You are sewing your own sleeping quilts and she shakes her head at her woolly son and his woolly friend and thinks, "Gee, this is never going to work." But she's smiling and laughing and while you might not know about it, she knows the sadness that her son carries and you seem like such a nice boy and Kenny seems so at peace when he's with you-she worries often about him but never when he's with you.

She takes you boys-to her, you are boys-to dinner at Auburn's Mongolian Barbecue for all-you-can-eat dinners and the Chinese proprietor smiles when he sees the three of you coming, and you might not know it, but Kenny's mom knows, he hates the sight of you three, because you and Kenny sit at the table for hours, plotting adventures and talking about the trail and spinning dreams, but mostly piling bowl after bowl after bowl full of rice and broccoli and spinach and bamboo shoots, mashing the food down, and eating and mashing it down some more and eating some more and it's a wonder you don't drive that restaurant out of business. Kenny's mom loves her son and she's beginning to love you but she can't help it, she feels sorry for that little Chinese man.

A young man can imagine great adventures in the foothills, in the winter, over sewing machines and bowls of rice and vegetables. And you do. You both do. But the adventure is greater than even you can imagine. It's funny. For all your great plans, the greatest times happen when the plans fall apart. It happens after a snowstorm-there are so many snowstorms in the life you have chosen-and you and Kenny are short on food, so you bushwhack 43 miles through the mountains to the nearest town and you know it's going to take at least three days to even make it back to the trail. You buy onions, and garlic and lemons and a roll of tinfoil and a 6-pound bag of rice and some fishing gear. Not what most people think of as fishing gear. No, you buy two spools and a couple of hooks and a few lures.

And now you are standing in the middle of a river in a hidden canyon, holding a stick. Standing upstream, holding another stick, is your hiking partner, who has somehow become your best friend. The stream carves through a canyon, which slices through a section of California's High Sierra that is very difficult to find, even on a map. You have tied the hook to one end of the spool and flung it into the river. It is a foolish, absurd way to fish, but in hidden valleys, life is foolish and absurd and bountiful and the word "failure" doesn't mean much. Kenny catches a fish. Then you. Golden trout. You have been a vegan for five years. But Kenny has taught you, so, just like him, you look into the golden trout's eyes and you bash its head on a rock and you feel its life slipping from its body and you have always thought of meat as something people buy in grocery stores, but you will never think this way again. Years later you will say that this is the moment you learned that death not only is part of life, but that death can sustain life. For three days and nights you and Kenny toss lines into clear water and make your way upstream and east, along the river and up a snowy path toward the Pacific Crest Trail and for breakfast and lunch and dinner you feast on golden trout over crackling fires and the days and nights are cold, but you are warm and well-fed and alone and together in a place that is difficult to find, even on a map. He tells you wild, hilarious stories about the people he met in the psych ward, which always make you laugh. And he calls you "Duckface," because you carry a rubber duck that you found in the street in a mountain town and sometimes you start quacking, which always makes Kenny laugh.

You make the turn in Canada and head south and make it all the way to Reds Meadow, near Mammoth, where it starts snowing on October 18 and doesn't stop until a week and 5 feet later. It is your first and most glorious failure.

You try again the next year, alone, because Kenny has taken up whitewater rafting, and he's busy with that. You struggle through so much snow on the way north that you stop at the Canadian border. The next year, you read the weather reports and you know it's impossible, so you start in Canada and take a leisurely stroll south with your girlfriend, a poet and student named Rebecca. You try to make it both ways in 1999 and 2000, but each time, blizzards stop you before you're even out of Southern California.

The rest of your life? Off the trail? There are the tree-felling jobs, and a winter spent logging in Maine with Rebecca, but with all the trips and hiking, a relationship is tough and you split up. Your mother has been sick with lung cancer for a few years. She's a chain-smoker, and that makes you angry, and things have never been easy between you two, with her always telling you to get a regular job, buy a house, settle down. And besides, she carries her own sadness. People scare her, and open spaces and new things, so she avoids all that. When you were a kid, and friends came over, she would hide in a room. Those friends remember fleeting glimpses of her, in a hat and dark sunglasses, peering from behind a door. "Agoraphobic," doctors said, but to you, it's just a word. She's your mother. The last summer of her life, you don't hike. She dies in October 2001 and you don't hike the next year either.

That summer, on July 6, you meet a pretty girl with sun-streaked hair outside a restaurant called Chop Stix, near Santa Cruz, where you're doing some tree work. A month later, you and the pretty girl, a climber and acupuncture student named Michelle Clark, move in together. Women have always been attracted to you, and you to them. And in January, you're on a dayhike together and you tell her that come spring, you think you're going to try yo-yoing the PCT again and she says that's nice, what exactly does that mean? Well, it means you might be gone for 7 months. She's not happy, but she's a climber and a good sport, she believes in you, so she works on your résumé and on letters trying to drum up publicity and sponsors and she helps organize a slide show and rents a hall in Santa Cruz and gets some local musicians and she helps you raise $250. Then she drives you to the border, and when you call her after your first day and tell her your knee hurts, she puts together a package of moxa and ginger-Michelle practices Chinese medicine, too-and sends it to you.

Your knee gets better, but the weather worsens. You have never seen so much snow, so early in the season. Every day it dumps more and at Cedar Grove, on June 7, 2003, you hike for 15 hours and make it exactly 15 miles. That's when you quit. It's your fifth try, your fifth failure. You don't know if you'll ever try again.

Kenny? The kid who gave your story the best beginning, the right beginning? While you're trying to yo-yo the PCT, Kenny is making himself into one of the premier extreme kayakers in North America. While you're financing your hikes by climbing giant redwoods and little fruit trees in Santa Cruz, Kenny is scaling communications towers for pay near Auburn, hanging vinyl on tall buildings. One day in the spring of 1999, you visit him at his mom's and while you're on a dayhike together, he tells you he's been having a tough time, that he has to take pills every day, just to feel normal. You hadn't known, but you aren't shocked. Kenny had never been what you would call normal. You find out later that different doctors called Kenny's difficulties different things. Bipolar disorder. Schizoaffective disorder. Brief reactive psychosis related to stress. It doesn't matter to you. They're just words. Kenny is your partner, your best friend. Somewhere along the way, Kenny has become your brother.

In the early winter of 2002, you climb North Palisade, a 14,000-footer. It's so cold your equipment is freezing, and you have to take your gloves off to brush the ice away and eventually your fingers freeze up and you have to turn back, just 300 vertical feet short of the summit. You don't know it, but Kenny returns a few weeks later and completes the climb.

You talk to him again that spring. You and Michelle have driven up north and you're going to hike to a waterfall that Kenny took you to once, down a remote canyon of the American River. You call him from a pay phone, near the river. Does Kenny remember the waterfall? Can he give you some tips on how to get there? Does he? Can he? There's a slot canyon, and you can rappel down it, and the bottom is hidden, but unbelievably beautiful, another world! It's incredible! It's amazing! Kenny is so enthusiastic, shouting so loud, you have to hold the phone away from your ear, smiling. You remember that. It's funny the things you remember. Michelle, standing next to you, can hear him, too. She has never met Kenny, but she has heard you talk about him, has seen your scrapbooks filled with pictures and writings from him. You don't know it, but she worries about you a lot. This is the first time she hears his voice, and she loves how it makes you smile. You hear from him one more time-in early September. He calls and leaves a message-"Hey, it's me, call me back," but you're busy. Would things have turned out differently if you had called him?

You don't know it, but things are bad. The sadness isn't coming and going anymore. It's staying. He checks himself into the hospital, but that doesn't work. He takes medication, but that doesn't work. Now he's doing free solo climbs, running riskier and more dangerous falls. He talks to people about kayaking off Yosemite Falls with a parachute. He talks about skydiving in a kayak, "to see how it handles."

Kenny's mom tries to help, but she doesn't know what to do. She wishes Kenny had a kindred spirit in his family-someone who could understand him. But his dad and his older brother are doctors, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of men, and Kenny has never related to that life. He has a younger sister, but what can a younger sister do? What can a mother do? Kenny's mom thinks of you. She worries about Kenny all the time, but she never worries about him when he's with you. She tells Kenny-okay, maybe she nags him a little-why doesn't he call you? Why doesn't he pick up the phone so the two of you can plan another one of your epic hikes together? But he doesn't call.

He makes eight trips to the hospital, and the doctors do their best, adjust his meds, but each trip is worse than the last. When he leaves the eighth time, he's so desperate, so crestfallen, his mom tells him she doesn't want him to ever have to go back and he says he doesn't want to go back either.

You pick up the phone on the 1st of October, 2002. No one has heard from Kenny in four days and Kenny's mom is scared, she asks if you know where he is. She calls back on the 5th. Searchers have found his truck, parked near the top of a rocky bluff. They had combed the area for days, with no luck, and then one of the searchers had looked down and seen a bear at the bottom of the cliff. It was feeding on Kenny's body.

When Kenny's mom is going through her son's things, she finds a note. It's addressed to you. It's a goodbye note. He didn't want to go back to the hospital. He hated his pills. He didn't see any other way out. You give the eulogy, on the banks of the American River, where Kenny loved to hike and fish and raft. You tell the 400 mourners that you have lost your best friend. Three other speakers say the same thing. Weird, how such a young man, carrying so much sadness, could have so many best friends.

After Kenny's friends speak, the preacher rises, walks to the front of the crowd. He begins to talk and at that instant a flock of ducks flies overhead, quacking, and they land behind him, on the river. He raises his voice and they quack louder. The preacher keeps trying, but the ducks quack so loud no one can hear what he's saying. You and Michelle look at each other. "It's him," she says.

It is a terrible winter, a season of grief, and Michelle is worried sick about you, she hopes spring will bring healing, but it doesn't. The next winter is terrible, too. You write to Kenny's mom. "How do you go on when you lose your best friend?" You talk to her once a week and she tells you she has lost a son and you have lost a mother, but now you have each other. You can't sleep. Mornings, you're bone-tired. The times you manage to drift off, you wake screaming. You wake Michelle. And some nights, Michelle wakes on her own and finds you staring at pictures of Kenny, holding the scrapbooks with records of your hikes together. You avoid other people, spend more and more time alone. She doesn't know what to do. Ever since she met you, she has worried about you. But she never worried when you were with Kenny. She tells you to get outside, to hike, to climb. Michelle knows the climbing community in Santa Cruz, they're her friends, so she calls them. She calls people she knows, asks them if they'll climb with you, then tells you-okay, maybe she nags a little-that they're waiting for your call, but you don't call. Sometimes, desperate, she prays. Not to God. She prays to Kenny.

You and Michelle break up in February-it just got too intense-and you don't have any work lined up, or anything else tying you down, so you try again. You leave Mexico April 22, 2004. You're not sure you're going to yo-yo. You're not sure of anything.

On the trail, you grieve for Kenny, but you don't worry about him anymore. You don't have to. And you don't have to worry about how sick your mother is, or what she wants you to do with your life, or the sadness she carries behind her dark sunglasses, in her dark little room. You don't have to worry about your next job, or packing, or whether you are going to attempt the hike again. All you have to worry about are water and food and shelter and it's liberating. Maybe no man is an island, but god the waters can be choppy, they can drown a man if he's not careful and there is something to be said for hiking alone in the Sierra in early spring, with no girlfriend, no job, no family, no skinny kid carrying unbearable sadness in his stripped-down, strapless pack. You have your beans and corn chips and tarp and sleeping quilt. You think you have everything you need. You're so wrong.

When your dad and the man known as Mr. Beer take you to her, the first thing you notice about the deaf girl is how weathered she looks, how worn-down. She scribbles notes. She says she has been trying to catch you since she left Mexico two weeks ago, four days after you. You work that out in your head. She has been covering more than 30 miles a day. She says she has covered all of Southern California without a trail map. She says she is trying to break the women's speed record from Mexico to Canada.

As you scribble back and forth, literally comparing notes, you look at her again. She has just walked through a section of the American West where water sources are sometimes 30 miles apart, where the best way to locate them is with a map, and the second best way by sound. She has just hiked through a region infested with rattlesnakes (she has seen 10). And here she is, to your eyes malnourished, still without a map, cheerfully outlining her plans to race to Canada.

Later, when you remember meeting Patti, and you talk to strangers about things like inner peace and karma and living in harmony with the universe, you will apologize; use words like "cheesy" and "new-agey." But here, late at night next to the Current River, you can't ignore what you see. What you feel. It's spooky. It shakes you a little. You have only met one other person in your life who approached absurd difficulties and daunting challenges with such unreasonable joy, such blithe good humor. Climb every mountain? Ford a gazillion streams? Now that's living. You never thought you would run into anyone else like him. Can a man be sad and bursting with joy all at once?

The next morning, your father drives away-he'd come all the way down from Richmond just to see you for a night-and the man known as Mr. Beer, who you met on the trail and camped with for one night, takes off. Then it's just you and the deaf girl, Patti Haskins. She has a master's degree in biochemistry, and she works at a day-care center in Yosemite Valley. She's fast, but you're faster, and you move ahead. You wait an hour for her in a meadow, and then an hour and a half. Then you leave a note. Gotta go.

A man travels fastest when he travels alone. You camp alone that night, and hike the next day and it surprises you, but you're worried. And maybe you miss her a little. And at the end of that next day, skirting a snowfield, you hear a strange sound. There she is, yelling on a rock, like she knew you would find her-or she would find you. She had lost the trail, had simply continued north, mapless. It's funny how people can shake up your plans. This was going to be a solo trip. The rest of the summer, all the way to Canada, you hike together.

You learn to sign. You tell her that the Top Ramen and Cup-a-Soup she has been eating is wearing her down, that she should start eating organically, like you. She tells you that for someone who talks so much about organic food, you eat an awful lot of Snickers bars whenever you're near a store, and by the way, you should start slathering on sunscreen, like her. She sticks with Top Ramen. You stick with Snickers and bare skin.

You watch out for each other. When Patti gets sick and has to go to the bathroom 20 times one day, you worry. When you bite down on a chip and a molar on your right side breaks, you spit it out. Now the nagging about the Snickers gets intense. She spends a lot of time peering in your mouth, at the half tooth, worrying about decay and infection.

But those are minor things. They're bonding things. Life in the mountains with Patti is okay. It's more than okay. One evening, she walks to a stream to fetch water and she disappears around a bend, and then you hear her scream. It's a weird thought, you have no idea why it comes to you, but you're certain she has found a body. You have never heard such screams. You sprint down the creek, around the bend, panting. And there she is, screaming and singing. Patti is a beautiful woman, all dark hair and smooth limbs and sharp angles and she is trilling with joy. She's holding a bullfrog as big as a cantaloupe, laughing and singing. Only one other person in your life ever found such wild, outsized delight in nature.

On sunny days, you plunge into frigid alpine rivers, then scramble out and lay down in sun-soaked beds of wildflowers. On rainy nights, you huddle together underneath your tarp. And the more okay things get with Patti, the more you worry. Not about her nutrition, or her intestinal health. You are now just weeks from Canada, and you suspect that this time, you have a shot at making it all the way back. You also know how people can creep into your life and shake up your plans. You know that a man travels fastest when he travels alone. You remember the last person you loved like you love Patti. He was just a boy, and then he was a man, and it's different, of course, Patti is beautiful and soft, all smooth limbs and sharp angles. But it's the same, too. You never thought you would meet someone like him again and now you have and it scares you. You know what loss feels like. You know what loss can do to a man. You walk into Canada on August 8, 105 days after you left Mexico, 101 days after Patti started. She misses her record by a week, and since she has no money left, she catches a bus back to Yosemite. Hiking south, alone again, you cover 43 miles your first day. The second day, you walk 40 miles. The third day, 38 miles.

Late summer in the Cascades is a glorious time. Long days, and lush flowers and torrents of water and plenty of time to think. You think about Patti and your mother and your damaged salivary gland and the man who shot you, the man in the hood, and how you'd like to teach kids about the wilderness, about how tree-felling is a young man's occupation and how you're 32 and you won't be able to do it for much longer and maybe you ought to really consider college. You think about beef and spinach and coffee, you think hard about those things. You think of the long days and nights talking with Kenny about how difficult it was to be true to yourself when you were surrounded by wage slaves and soulless corporations and creeping technology, and how you told Kenny that a man couldn't spend his entire life on the PCT, the important thing was to find balance in your life, and Kenny did his best and his best wasn't enough. You wonder how the man known as Mr. Beer is doing back at home in Sapporo, Japan (which is why he's known as Mr. Beer). You think about all the hikers you have met over the years-Hobo Joe, the homeless Vietnam vet who every few years scrapes enough money together to hit the trail, and does fine until he hits a town with a liquor store, then ends up in the county jail for a few nights; and Maineiac, who lives in Maine, and Walking Carrot, who loves carrots and Real Fat, who is really fat, and The Abominable Slow Man, who is astoundingly pokey, and the Leprechaun, who stands six foot eight.

The kid? He comes to you at the oddest times. In southern Oregon, you run out of water and hike 15 miles to a stream near Mt. McGloughin to refill your bottle, but the stream is dry and it's 15 miles until the next one and you're thirsty and in trouble and then, there, right on the trail, is a water bottle, 16 ounces just sitting there and you know it's cheesy, you know it's new agey, but you can't help it, you think about death, and life, the cosmic wheel and all that, and how even when someone leaves you, maybe he's not gone at all. You feel Kenny's presence then; you know he's with you.

You think about Michelle, who really is sweet, and supportive, and beautiful and all-around great, and you wonder if the two of you might ever get together again. And you think of Rebecca, in Maine, and the poem she wrote called "The Mandible Bullet," about the convenience store shooting. Rebecca was sweet, too, and you loved that poem, you wish you still had a copy of it. And you think about other former girlfriends, and how women are great, but relationships are complicated, especially when you have a goal, and maybe you're better off not exactly in one right now. And of course you think some more of Patti, whose trail name is Silent Running, which even by trail-name standards is weird, because she's deaf, not mute.

Women are tricky. Relationships are tricky. The trail is simple. You wake at 5:30 and by six you're hiking. You hike till nine o'clock and you stop for a 15-minute meal and then you hike till the early afternoon, eat another quick meal, and then you hike a few more hours, when you stop just to chop some garlic and to mix your dried beans with water, and you hike another few hours, and then you have dinner, a leisurely 30 or 40 minutes, and then you hike until it's dark. Every day, you hike at least 35 miles, and most days, you don't see a soul. From Crater Lake to near Tahoe-1,000 miles-you don't see anyone on the trail. You're alone. Days and days alone.

Why? Because you can't survive off the trail? Because things like steady work and marriage and a house fill you with fear, because the only place you feel safe is here, strolling through fields of golden yarrow and red maids and prickly poppies and yellow and white monkey flowers, sleeping under wheeling constellations? That's what Michelle thinks. To her, God is everywhere, but she's pretty sure you only feel Him-or Her, or It, or The Great Whatever-on the trail. Or do you do it because you love deeply and grieve deeply and sometimes you don't know the difference, and you're trying to come to terms with your friend's death? That's what Kenny's mom thinks. She didn't start to feel better about Kenny until she visited the rivers he rafted and the trails he hiked-all the spots he'd been happiest. She's sure you're on a journey of acceptance and healing.

And you? What do you think?

"Kenny's death played a part," you say politely but firmly. "So I suppose you could say I did it for him. But as I've told a lot of people, the only reason to do something like this is for yourself."

You can tell the temperature within two degrees just by the viscosity of the mucus in your nose, and you can predict snow by how the air feels on your skin. But you have never been very good at explaining yourself, at dissecting your feelings, at sharing your inner life.

Still, even a man as self-contained as you, even a man who has been shot in the face and whose mother has died and whose best friend has killed himself-even a man who has responded to injury and loss and death by walking away from others and into the woods-even a man like you must feel joy and relief and a tremendous sense of accomplishment as he closes in on the goal that has eluded him for nearly a decade.

How do you feel?

"Very neutral," you say, with profound and oddly moving blockheadedness.

You reach the Mexican border on Saturday, November 13, 2004 and there to greet you are your father, who has driven 12 hours from Richmond, and Patti, who has driven 8 hours from Yosemite and Kenny's mom, who has driven 12 hours from Auburn. There is a photo crew, too, and dozens of long-distance hikers who know about you. You tell Patti you can't believe it's over. You tell her that finishing makes you sad. Kenny's mom hugs you and tells you that Kenny would be proud. And that's a sweet ending to your story, but it's not the best one. It's not the right one.

It leaves out what's next. It leaves out Patti asking you to spend more time in Yosemite, and Michelle, who has moved from Santa Cruz to Truckee, asking you to visit Truckee more often and you feeling guilty and annoyed that you can't do either-that you don't want to do either. It leaves out the way the daily e-mail with Patti becomes weekly, then biweekly, then merely occasional.

It leaves out where you are now, living in a 1984 Toyota 4×4 in the Santa Cruz mountains, taking the occasional tree-felling job. It omits the fact that until recently, fifteen rolls of slides from your trip sat in your father's freezer, because you couldn't afford to have them developed. He did it for you, as a Christmas gift. It leaves out how you can't afford to rent a room somewhere. How you can't afford to fix your tooth.

You'll figure it out. Or you won't. You turn 33 in May. You have many trips in front of you. Or you don't. The money will come. Or it won't. The answers will present themselves, or not. You have to be patient. You have to avoid gazing too far into the future. These are the lessons that any would-be yo-yo hiker must learn. You have learned them. You have to savor each day, to love the journey. A step at a time, an hour at a time. So let's pick a good hour to end your tale. There are so many to choose from. What about the afternoon in San Diego, where you and Patti drove after finishing in Mexico, where you swam in the ocean and floated on your back and marveled at how everything flows from the mountains and ends up in the sea, and you were no different; where you drank cup after cup of coffee and ate plate after plate of spinach salad? No? What about rush hour in the East Bay, stuck in traffic, doing your best to apply the lessons of the trail-the lessons of patience and acceptance and grace and being a part of the troubled society you and Kenny talked about? No? What about midday in Barney's Burgers, on the Berkeley border, where you tuck into a one-pound monster patty and a half-order of curly fries and a blackberry milkshake and spin tales about Hobo Joe and Real Fat and The Wall and the folly of long-distance hikers who leave the trail and reenter society with rage and bitterness and hatred for things like traffic jams and jobs, not realizing that those things are as much a part of life as soaring hawks and fragrant sunrises?

No? You have always had difficulty with beginnings and endings. You have been through enough grief. So why don't we pick a moment in the middle. The right ending. Let's choose a moment of peace.

It has been raining for a week. It's late July and you and Kenny have been on the trail since March 2, through blizzards and windstorms and hidden canyons filled with golden trout. And now, in Washington's Glacier Peak Wilderness, headed north, at mile 2,450, high on a ridge, your food supplies are practically gone, and you're not only cold and wet, you're hungry. A chilly, damp twilight and you throw off your packs and set up your tarp and try to build a fire to dry out and to get warm but most of the wood is wet. Kenny scrabbles into the dirt at the base of a tree, looking for dry kindling. It's a western hemlock. Isn't it funny the things a man remembers?

Kenny shouts. "I found a beer!" It's a Miller Icehouse. You remember that, too. Then he shouts some more. He has dug up six cans of food. Chili and corn and corned beef hash and okra. But only one beer. You and Kenny convene for a crucial Pacific Crest Trail yo-yo summit conference. Together you decide that half a beer simply will not do, that one of you should drink the entire thing. You flip a nickel and Kenny wins. Has a single beer ever filled anyone with such utter, outsized delight?

It's the spring of 1996 and the left side of your face is missing a functioning salivary gland. You don't have a steady job or health insurance. You don't know if you'll make it back to Mexico this year, or even if you'll make it to the Canadian border. You have no idea about the difficulties and pain that lurk in the decade ahead, about what loss will do to you. It doesn't matter, though. You are blessed, rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams. You have the mountain peaks and the stars and a warm fire and corn and chili and okra and corned beef hash and your tarp and your very good friend drinking a beer, your brother who you have tried to teach about balance and who has taught you so much about joy. You have never been good at beginnings and endings, but that's okay, because beginnings and endings don't really matter here. Maybe there is no beginning, no ending. Maybe-yeah, it's cheesy, it's kind of new agey-life and death are part of the same cycle, and sometimes one death can sustain another life, the cosmic wheel and all that. So maybe the story ends in 1996. Maybe it begins here, too. Maybe all that counts is the journey and you have that. Maybe there is only now, and you have now. You have this moment, underneath the branches of the western hemlock tree, with your hiking partner, who has become your best friend, who has become your brother. You have everything you need. You have everything you will ever need.

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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Scott Williamson

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Get full access to Outside Learn, our online education hub featuring in-depth fitness, nutrition, and adventure courses and more than 2,000 instructional videos when you sign up for Outside+ Sign up for Outside+ today. Campo, CA, Nov.

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My editorial cartoon satirizing Trump and the border crisis went viral. Then I lost my job - Michael de Adder

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My editorial cartoon satirizing Trump and the border crisis went viral. Then I lost my job - Michael de Adder

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Opinion | I was fired after my cartoon satirizing Trump went viral. Here’s why it matters.

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Trump makes the case for editorial cartoonists pretty much every day. Are we really willing to allow such an important journalistic tradition to die out?

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Ten Things I've Been Meaning to Say to You | Jason Reynolds

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Ten Things I've Been Meaning to Say to You | Jason Reynolds

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Dear Reader,

If you are a young person - by young person I mean 19 and younger, though young-at-hearters aren't excluded. Nor are older people. Or old people. But I'm speaking primarily to young people. Anyway, if you are a young person, the following are 10 things I've been meaning to say to you:

1. I don't believe social media is going to lead to the apocalypse. I know many people my age do, even though many of us are as caught up in its webbing as you. As a matter of fact, my generation is the generation that created it, and pushed it on you, almost force-feeding you avatars and touchscreens since you were born, only to criticize you for engaging with them, not as accessories, but as appendages. And the way we criticize is by saying (ad nauseam) that social media, and your obsession with it, will lead to the apocalypse. Well, I've never believed that. And quite frankly, I have other ideas about what will lead to the apocalypse, and it turns out it has more to do with people two or three times your age. What I do think, though, is that social media might, if we're not careful, turn an entire generation into a selfie. A generation that only looks at itself, contrived, posed to present a false perfection, won't be able to avoid or learn from the mistakes of the generations that have come before it. So... sometimes, let me take a photo with you. Just sometimes. You can put a filter on it and everything. And if not, that's okay. Then just let me take it. Let me snap the picture. Let me be involved in framing you. Let me help capture you in your best light. Maybe even tag me in the post. But please, please, please don't force me to photobomb you, because I'll do it and all you'll do is hit delete.

2. There's no way you can want to do away with injustice unless you want to do away with all of it. Remember that. You can't be anti-racist, but tease people about their weight. You can't fight for women's rights, and talk about your classmates who learn differently. I know, I know, you can't fight every fight. Except... you can. Accept... you can.

3. There's a difference between being irreverent and irresponsible. Remember this forever.

4. There are no such things as safe spaces. I'm sorry. I wish there were. I really, really do. But the world won't always be kind. As a matter fact, a lot of you already know this. So, if you are fortunate to be in a space - school, team, etc. - that has created an emotional safeness for you, use it, not just as place to relax and be yourself, but also as a place to develop relationships and fortified friendships that can recreate that warmth and comfort when school and/or the season are over. When the wolves of the world are growling. I use my mother for this. She reminds me that I'm built for this. She reminds me that I'm a wolf trap.

5. Speaking of mothers, text yours. A simple "I love you" goes a long way. She's trying. She's always trying.

6. Continue to push back. Bang your fists. Scream until your throats are stripped. Cry out. Walk out. March. Fight, fight, fight what you don't agree with, even if adults don't agree with you. Even if adults call you crybabies. Because that kind of emotion, that kind of fearlessness and gumption, that kind of empathetic desire is a seed that will grow you into adults who actually care about the world. This is true "social media."

7. Sing your song, do your dance, talk your talk. I sure did. We sure did.

8. Remember courage is often less about what you do, and more about what you don't. I know, that's a little corny, but many of you know how difficult this is. When I was younger the conversation around peer pressure was such a snoozer. Like... come on. It was always, "If so-and-so jumps off a bridge, are you going to jump?" And of course I would always say, "Of course not! That don't even make no sense." But then... when I got to that bridge, and I saw so-and-so jump, I started to ask myself, "Well... did he live?" And, "Is there water down there? Because if so, why not jump?" Yeah... don't jump. Trust me. It ain't worth it.

9. But when it comes to your dreams, JUMP. Always jump!

10. I like you. A lot. I know, that's kind of a soft landing, but this thing was supposed to be 10 things I've been meaning to tell you, and I always tell you I love you, but I rarely tell you how much I like you. So... I like you. You're wild sometimes, and a little all over the place, but, hey, so am I. But that's easy for me to say, because, well, I'm not your teacher. So... let's start this one over.

10. Be gentle with your teachers. Especially the ones you know are in it for you. And I know you know who those teachers are, because one of the things I like most about you is your ability to discern which adults actually care. So, I'm talking about those teachers. The ones who acknowledge your presence and reward your trying. Remember, they too are trying. They really, really are. Sometimes more than you know.

Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author, a Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, National Book Award Honoree, a Kirkus Award winner, a two-time Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors. The American Booksellers Association's 2017 spokesperson for Indies First, his many books include When I Was the Greatest, Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely), As Brave as You, For Every One, the Track series (, , , and ), and Long Way Down, which received both a Newbery Honor and a Printz Honor. He lives in Washington, DC. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com.

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Ten Things I've Been Meaning to Say to You by Jason Reynolds

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Dear Reader, If you are a young person - by young person I mean 19 and younger, though young-at-hearters aren't excluded. Nor are older people. Or old people. But I'm speaking primarily to young people. Anyway, if you are a young person, the following are 10 things I've been meaning to say to you: 1.

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As Black women, there’s so much pressure on us to be everything to everyone.

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Children in the Garden: On Life at a 3,100-Mile Race - Longreads

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Another beauty of endurance is that it is happening at all times. It is everywhere we look. To see someone, anyone, in this world is to witness someone engaged in a feat of endurance.

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"Online School" by Madhav Kejariwal, age 16

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"Online School" by Madhav Kejariwal, age 16

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The Book of Awesome - Neil Pasricha

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Dear Notre Dame,

It's funny how life works out.

I visited this university for the first time when I was about 16 or 17 years old and was recruited to play here. I had a choice to make, and in the end what it came down to was Ohio State or Notre Dame. And I chose Ohio State. I loved Tyrone Willingham. I thought he was a great coach, and to be honest, he reminded me a bit of my father.

Fast-forward to last year, and you might have heard that I was being considered for a couple of coaching jobs. During that time, me and my wife, Joanna, took a trip down to Louisiana and then up here to South Bend - and when we got back home, it was another tough decision. I can't tell you exactly what it was that told us to come to Notre Dame, but there was something. We all know there's something different about Notre Dame. We all know it's something special. And I just thank God that I didn't make the wrong decision twice.

Now, I know our community and our fans didn't expect to get their head coach changed in Week 13 of the season, but that's our reality, and I couldn't be more grateful to Jack Swarbrick and Father Jenkins for their faith in me to step into this role.

I could tell you 100 ways that I understand how special this place is, that I understand this football team, and that I know what it takes to win a National Championship.

But I've learned something valuable in my career as a coach: It isn't always about what you say. At the end of the day, it's about the impact of what you do and how you make people feel.

One of the best pieces of advice I've gotten is that you have to be yourself.
- Marcus Freeman

I think back to my high school defensive coordinator. His name was Pat Wood, an older guy, probably in his sixties back when he was coaching me. He was old school. Tough, demanding..... not a big fan of mistakes. But the more you got to know him, the more you realized that he really cared, and I think the older and more mature I became, the more I realized, Man, that guy really loved coaching young people. He might have cared more than anyone. And that's the kind of coach you can expect me to be.

I'm going to care about these young men, and what we're building together here, with all I've got.

There was about a day and a half there when I knew this was going to be a reality, but I wasn't allowed to talk to my team. And I'll be honest with you: That was a stressful day and a half. Once everything was announced, though, and I finally could talk to them - it was a great release. I wouldn't say it was a pep talk that I gave, as much as it was a statement of purpose. A statement of gratitude. It was me letting them know how much I appreciate them, and how much I love them.

Because Notre Dame football.... it's about them.

It will always be about them. That's one thing I know for sure.

a player's coach@Marcus_Freeman1 | #GoIrish pic.twitter.com/pf9E1OygA8
- Notre Dame Football (@NDFootball) December 3, 2021

Another thing I know about these players - they're smart, and they're independent. That's the deal when you're a student and a player at a prestigious school like this. From the minute you wake up at 6:00 a.m. to the minute you go to sleep, you don't have a choice to turn it off, to relax. If you don't compete, and you're not a tough-minded individual from the minute you get to class, then you're not going to have success here. That's just a hard fact.

And when you get up every day with that mentality, eventually it just becomes who you are.

That's why you're seeing us out there playing our best ball at the end of the season. Because this is what our guys know how to do.

It's not a grind, it's not a drag. It's what we do.

And that's what makes the Notre Dame football player different.

Listen, I know I've been labeled as a player's coach, and I'm proud to wear that badge. But I'll be honest, I think there's a misconception about a player's coach, that Oh, the players like him - he's their buddy. And my players know this: just because I don't walk around like I have to put fear in their hearts, that doesn't mean the demands aren't going to be extremely high. I've always been a believer that being a coach doesn't mean there has to be some constant level of discomfort for kids to reach their goals. You can be very demanding, and still make people feel good and still make people feel important - as long as they believe that you have their best interest at heart.

That's the coach I've always been, and I'm going to stay true to that. These kids today are so smart. They're so intelligent, and they know what's real and what's phony. If you're not authentic they'll see right through you.

One of the best pieces of advice I've gotten is that you have to be yourself. I've gotten that same advice, over and over, from some of the best leaders I've ever talked to. Guys like Jim Tressel, Luke Fickell. Heck, Ryan Day said this two days ago - You have to be yourself. And that's 100% true. If I tried to be Brian Kelly as a head coach, that wouldn't make sense. Same thing if I tried to be Luke Fickell, or Jim Tressel, or anybody else I've coached with. If we're going to have success here at Notre Dame during my tenure, I'm going to have to be me.

But it's also a part of learning and growing that you always take a little bit here, a little bit there, from everyone you encounter in the make-up of who you are. And I'll be the first to admit that all those guys are a piece of the way I lead. They've all shaped me as a coach.

I would say that my leadership style really comes down to two main ideas.

First off, being disciplined - having a routine, doing the things that it takes to have success, working tirelessly. My dad was a little bit older, and he was retired by the time I was born, and so he raised me with the structure that being in the Air Force for 26 years will teach you. He taught my older brother and I that only work ethic and motivation will get you to where you want to go.

And second, being selfless - having the ability and the character to serve others. I think I got that from my mother. She's a Korean woman who fell in love with this American guy that was stationed over in Korea. And she left all of her comfort, back home, in order to start a family with my dad in the United States. She's taught me so much about sacrifice, how it can be its own reward.

This team is in a really good position right now. We're 11-1. And through that brief window of chaos we experienced last week, I said to our leadership, look, we need to enhance - but we don't need to change. There are key parts of this coaching staff that have gotten us to this point. I think we have the best coaching staff in America. And to the "bring in your own guys" crowd, I'll just say: These coaches we have here are my guys. So that was my M.O. as this was all coming together. I was hoping to keep as much consistency for this group as possible. Because we're right there, man. We're ready. We're extremely close to being in a position to win a National Championship.

I want to be a representation, but also more than that I want to be a demonstration.
- Marcus Freeman

And then there's one more thing I want to say about the role I'm stepping into.

The longer I'm in this profession, the more it's become really obvious what it means for a man that looks like me to be elevated in this industry.

I'm a part of the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches started by Coach Locksley. He's doing an unbelievable job of trying to open up doors for minority coaches. And being a part of this coalition has been an important reminder that: Hey, you are a representation of a lot of people. And that's what I want to be. I want to be a representation, but also more than that I want to be a demonstration. I want to be a demonstration of what someone can do, and the level they can do it at, if they are given the OPPORTUNITY. Because that's what is needed: opportunity. We need more minorities to get the opportunity to interview - and we need more minorities to get the opportunity to do a job that they can have success in.

Actually, let me end on one quick story.

There's something I say to our players before we go out there every game: One play, one life.

Focus on the play, focus on the moment.

A couple weeks ago, we had a game coming up against Georgia Tech. And at this point in the season, we're playing some of the best ball we've played. We hadn't given up a touchdown in two weeks. And you just knew it, you know? You could feel it in the locker room: Our guys were dying to get a shutout.

We made it to halftime vs. Tech, and we'd given up zero points. Those boys were hyped. And I got after them a bit. I said, "I'm not worried about a shutout. I'm not worried about what the score is at the end of the game right now - because we're still in the thick of it. What I'm worried about right now is execution on every single play." One play, one life.

And they went out there in the second half and played some of the most focused football we've played all year. And yeah, they got the shutout. But the better feeling, for me? It was the satisfaction of them earning a shutout. It was what led to the outcome, not the outcome itself.

At the end of the day, man, that's why I do this. We have a lot that we want to accomplish here, without a doubt. Trust me - this is Notre Dame. We have big goals. But it's the process it takes to get to those goals that's going to set us apart. It's the way we're going to win, that's going to set these young men up to achieve what it is they ultimately want out of this game.

And I couldn't be more grateful for the opportunity to lead them.

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Dear Notre Dame, It's funny how life works out. I visited this university for the first time when I was about 16 or 17 years old and was recruited to play here. I had a choice to make, and in the end what it came down to was Ohio State or Notre Dame.

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Creative nonfiction

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"Growing up, we could make up two cricket teams with the young guys around here. Not anymore."

Trevor Chen sits with his brother Stephen inside Sei Vui Club in Tiretti Bazaar, Kolkata's old Chinatown. They're waiting for the rest of the group to show up. They used to play gully cricket outside, Trevor says, when they had more friends. But now they're down to just the handful of them, in their thirties and forties. "Almost all bachelors," one of their friends would say later.

So it's boys' night some evenings after work, and tonight, in a hall upstairs decorated with portraits of Gandhi and Sun Yat-sen, they'll be playing ping-pong. That, they have enough manpower for.

Tiretti Bazaar is not what it used to be. "There was a time you couldn't walk down the street without bumping into Chinese people. Those days are gone. There are more Kolkatan Chinese in Toronto today than there are in Kolkata," says a retiree I meet at another club who sports a Toronto Maple Leafs cap.

Once the capital of the British Raj and a major trading port between Britain and China, Kolkata has always been home to the majority of India's Chinese, who first settled here in the late eighteenth century. At one time, there were tens of thousands of them; now, there are just about three thousand-including those in the other Chinatown, Tangra, which was once dominated by thriving Chinese tanneries. Everything changed in 1962, when the Sino-Indian border war struck a rift between the local Chinese and Indians. Thousands of Chinese fled India; more emigrated in the following decades and continue to leave in pursuit of better lives.

But behind closed doors and dust-smeared windows, a resilient community continues about its daily life. Whatever "Chinatown" means, those who remain have found ways to survive in a changing neighborhood.

One day I walk into Tung Nam, one of the few Chinese restaurants left in Tiretti Bazaar, and ask for Chinese tea. The waitress stifles a smile and shakes her head, and I feel sheepish. I've been presumptuous.

"All the Chinese restaurants mainly cater to Indians now," my Indian lunch companion tells me. So, along with Manchurian Chicken that was never Manchurian, I order a Coca-Cola.
2.
There is no grand pagoda arch in Tiretti Bazaar-of real or dubious authenticity. Amid mom-and-pop shops, tented abodes, dhabas and godowns, a scatter of red buildings is the only visible testament to a once-Chinese enclave. They're the last five Chinese clubs here.

Traditionally the heart of diasporic Chinese communities everywhere, these clubs were a support network for new arrivals, and ran their own schools, newspapers, and cemeteries. Here, they remain a place where graying men gather for a chess game or a chin-wag, or to pray at elaborate Buddhist shrines, though many of the Chinese here are Christians, owing to the influence of missionary schools nearby. Each club admits members based on common ancestral ties, and is named after its village of origin in China. Except for one.

"Gee Hing means revolutionary club," Chang Tao Cheng, a semi-retired dentist, tells me over noodles and whiskey. The talk here is that it was founded sometime in the mid-nineteenth century by men united in the aim of overthrowing the Qing dynasty. Unlike other clubs, it's open to all Chinese. "We Hubeinese used to have our own club, but due to the dearth of members, we've come here," he says.

It's also the only club that gets a mah-jong game going. As I take pictures, another man approaches me, his forehead in knots. "You're a Chinese from Malaysia? Surely you have mah-jong at home?"

We do. But what's interesting to me is the idea of "Chinatown." Chinese Malaysians form a large minority spread all over the country, and I never grew up in one. In Chinatown, I feel part insider, part interloper-its Chinese-ness simultaneously comforting and alienating. I went to a Mandarin-language primary school and my family still practices the traditional ceremonial rituals, but English is my first language and I grew up on American and British pop culture. It's not so much the Chinese-ness of Chinatown I'm drawn to, but how it inhabits the city that surrounds it.

Back at the ping-pong game, I listen as the guys flick Hindi at each other along with topspins, backspins, and sidespins. It's their first language even among Chinese friends, their dialects reserved for the home. To hear them speak is to experience, at once, the specificity and expansiveness of this world.
3.
In 1778, a man popularly known as Tong Atchew founded a sugar mill twenty miles southwest of Kolkata and brought in laborers from China. When he died, they moved on to Tiretti Bazaar.

"We call him Achi Appa (father) and visit his grave to venerate him as India's first known Chinese settler," says Lawrence Ho, a member of Nam Soon Club. "He's why the word for sugar here is the same word for Chinese: chini."

Like Atchew, most of Kolkata's Chinese have origins in China's Guangdong province. They came to India in waves, fleeing China's successive civil wars and the Japanese invasion during World War II. To make a living, the Hakkas became tanners and shoemakers; the Cantonese, carpenters; the Hubeinese, dentists. They founded laundries, restaurants, and beauty parlors. Perhaps because of the Indian caste system, most of them still hew to these occupations. But they no longer dominate them, and they can no longer count on just Chinese patrons.

At the Sunday market, I see Chinese and Indians both hawking baos and wonton soup to a mixed clientele. Sylvester Huang is out buying breakfast for his aging parents. He was nineteen when he left Kolkata for Taiwan, learned to tend bar and talk to girls, and built a life for himself. When he turned fifty a few years ago, he came back. "I'm a citizen of Taiwan now. Here, I don't have many friends left, and I can't have the things I want. But I have no choice."

He invites me to steamed dumplings from an Indian lady's corner stand, and another man gives me the lowdown on their bonafides: "Her husband is Chinese, so they're not bad." In fact, most of the Chinese in Tiretti Bazaar are intermarried.

As a Chinese Malaysian, I'm at home with the confluence of cultures. I like Manchurian Chicken, served with a sauce of green chilis, garlic, onions, soy sauce, and vinegar in Chinese restaurants here. It's a staple that's created not in China, but in India.

"For Indians, authentic Chinese food is too bland. They want the punch of chili and the umami of soy sauce," says Dominic Lee, who heads a family business manufacturing sauces that have found their way into kitchens across the country. His latest experiment: an alchemy of curry and soy.
4.
"My grandfather came to India in 1926. He worked hard, and returned to Hubei every year to buy land. When the communist revolution happened, he lost all of it," says Chang Tao Cheng. That sent the last influx of Chinese into India, and for Tao Cheng's grandfather and many others, Kolkata became home.

For most of the fifties, India and China maintained amicable relations and Nehru, the first prime minister of India, was one of the first world leaders to recognize Mao's China. But the countries' rivalry for regional supremacy soon turned into enmity, made worse when India granted asylum to the Dalai Lama after the Tibetan revolt against Chinese occupation in 1959.

When India and China clashed over their border in 1962, about three thousand Chinese-most from the nearby northeast regions-were rounded up at a desert camp in Rajasthan on suspicion of being communist. Lawrence Ho was eight years old when his family was taken from Assam. They stayed at the camp for two years; others, longer. Ostracized, some felt they had little choice but to return to China on ships the Chinese government dispatched to collect them, though it was no longer their home. Others chose to leave for other countries.

Former internees I speak to broach the subject cautiously. They say that the camp was not a "Nazi camp," that the Indian government claimed to have put them there for their own safety. But their lives were disrupted. They lost homes, businesses, jobs. Those who were Indian citizens were stripped of some of their citizenship rights. And those who escaped internment were not exempt from restrictions. "In Kolkata, you couldn't even cross Howrah Bridge without a permit," Tao Cheng says. Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai (Indians and Chinese are brothers)-a slogan popular in the fifties-was no more.

In the war's aftermath, many Chinese families had to start over. "When we were released, we were put on a train to Howrah Station and dropped off on a street in Tiretti Bazaar. We had no house, nothing, and lived in Nam Soon Club for two years before my father found a job and moved us out," says Lawrence.

Despite the return to some semblance of normalcy in recent decades, many Chinese are still reticent about the war. "Why talk about the past? We should look to the future," Lawrence says.

Someone else recites a Hindi proverb, and translates it for me: "If you're swimming in the river, don't disturb the crocodile."
5.
"When I was young, I was unaware of the dynamics of the Chinese community. I only cared about my studies and friends. Only when I moved back from California ten years ago for my parents did I realize how fragmented it is, how closed to outsiders," Bean Ching Law tells me, as he offers me biscuits and tea in his home. He grew up in Tiretti Bazaar, but now lives with his wife and kids near Tangra.

A few years ago, a critical responsibility was thrust upon his shoulders. "Somehow a realtor found out that we are the last Hokkien family in Kolkata, and approached me about our Hokkien cemetery. He said, 'We'll build one thousand apartments there, and half the income will be yours.' I said, 'What? But my grandfather and granduncles are buried there.' I didn't know what to do."

So he called a meeting, and about thirty people representing a number of Chinese associations turned up. "I told them, 'With our population depleting, this concerns all of you. We have about six burial grounds, nine temples, and three schools in all of Kolkata, and we need to unite to protect them instead of keeping to our little groups.'" That was when he founded the Chinese Indian Association, and made the presidents of all the other associations members.

"There was already the Indian Chinese Association, but it focuses more on things like organizing Chinese New Year celebrations," he says. Any assertions of Chinese identity here tend to be couched in cultural terms, because of the community's long-standing self-sufficiency and its experience during the border conflict. Bean Ching is more willing to be political-"Not even political, but to enter the mainstream at all," he corrects me. "I mean, all right, you want to sing and dance. But if you're in trouble, who do you go to?"

He knows that the Chinese Indians are an insignificant voter base, but believes it would still benefit them to open up. "When I meet with politicians, they always say, 'You guys never come to us.' I agree. We always want to rely on ourselves. But we have to partner with the local authorities to preserve Chinatown because it's also in their interest to protect the city's cosmopolitan aspect. Otherwise, they will be left with the Hindus and the Muslims who are always fighting."
6.
I shimmy along gullies ignited by kaleidoscopic dioramas of Muslim domesticity and industry-goats jostling for space among humans, butchers laboring beneath glistening curtains of raw beef, men and boys washing themselves by the drain-before coming right up against the red doors of Nam Soon Club.

Outside, a company of Muslim men sleep and congregate on a platform built onto an adjacent wall. Inside, a few Chinese old-timers chat about the latest in a quiet temple courtyard. Standing on the threshold, I feel like I'm on the cusp of two separate worlds.

But every weekday from 8:00 A.M. to 1:30 P.M., these two worlds cross. That's when Muslim children, holding on to their parents' hands, converge at Nam Soon to attend a school for the underprivileged run by Lily Ho, who is seventy-one, and her daughter, Angelina Chen.

"Miss Lily taught me at a Muslim school I went to as a child. Now, I'm sending my daughter to her," says Haider Ali, whose parents moved to the area in the fifties from Bihar province. A Chinese elder tells me that the two communities have lived side by side for decades, but where Muslims used to occupy the area's fringes, they've since crowded in.

Chien Kuo was originally a Chinese school, and Lily and Angelina both studied here. "Today, we don't have a single Chinese student, so the Chinese community stopped giving us donations," Lily says. But she is dedicated to the school. She had once wanted to become a nun, but ended up marrying an Indian neighbor she grew up with-"only for Indian citizenship." There was no way around it. Now, she is the last of her family remaining in India.

In 2003, she decided to admit non-Chinese students so the school could survive. "We have about sixty children now, and they are all Muslims from around here. We don't teach Chinese subjects anymore, but sometimes I sing them Chinese songs." And though not all parents can afford the school's fees, Lily manages to make the monthly rent of 8,000 rupees to Nam Soon, which sustains the club.

"Because of this, there is a kind of trust between the Chinese and Muslim communities," Angelina says. "Nam Soon has been here for over a hundred years, and generations of Muslims are connected to this place."
7.
"If you give the younger generation a reason to stay, they will stay," Trevor Chen says. Most days, he mans Sei Vui Restaurant, right downstairs from where he lives with Stephen and his parents. The restaurant opened a year ago to increase revenue for the Sei Vui Club; many tour groups stop in for lunch. "So, two things, right? You take care of the business, and you take care of your family."

For others, however, the future isn't Kolkata. One day, I visit Clayton Chen, a nineteen-year-old who is mixed Indian and Chinese, in the apartment where he lives with his parents. He's watching American Horror Story on his computer, next to a tank containing two flowerhorns that are supposed to bring good feng shui. He's just returned from a trip to China sponsored by the Chinese consulate, and the Great Wall and the Forbidden Kingdom had made an impression. But the trip had greater significance.

"Our tour guide took us to the port where our ancestors had boarded ships to come to Kolkata. We also visited the universities, and I plan to apply to study medicine there." He's excited about the idea, though he would really rather go to Canada, where all his friends have gone. But for now, China offers the opportunity.

It's something Bean Ching Law gets behind. "The young should align themselves with the success of China. They have a natural advantage by virtue of their face, their name. But they're still hesitating. Maybe they think that if they talk about China, people will think, 'Oh, Chinese, China.' But the Indians are doing it. And it doesn't necessarily mean going to China," he says.

Who knows what will eventually become of Kolkata's old Chinatown? But for now, those who remain are keeping their heritage alive. And they're not alone. They're part of a constellation radiating outward-to Kolkata's less crowded suburbs, to Mumbai and Bengaluru, to Canada, America, Australia, China, England, Dubai... and when Chinese New Year comes around, that constellation retracts, drawing everyone back together amid dancing lions, whole-hog roasts, and dragon boat races on the Hooghly.

"In the month before, the text messages start coming in," James Lee, the secretary of Sei Vui Club, tells me. "'Save me a vest for the lion dance,' they say. 'I'm coming back.'"
This dispatch is from #VQRTrueStory, our social-media experiment in nonfiction, which you can follow by visiting us on Instagram: @vqreview. This project was supported by the National Geographic Society and the Out of Eden Walk.

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"Growing up, we could make up two cricket teams with the young guys around here. Not anymore." Trevor Chen sits with his brother Stephen inside Sei Vui Club in Tiretti Bazaar, Kolkata's old Chinatown. They're waiting for the rest of the group to show up.